Jim Shaw: The Ties that Bind: Study Drawings 2013–2023

'The Ties That Bind' offers an immersive entry into the strange, incisive world of Jim Shaw, an artist who since the late 1970s has built a vast and eclectic practice spanning photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, film, and music. This publication, conceived for the exhibition at M HKA in Antwerp, gathers 142 drawings made between 2013 and 2023, revealing the recurring fascinations that shape Shaw’s work: morality and myth-making, conspiracy and power, patriarchal structures, fictional worlds, hair lore, and the mechanics of cultural production. Essays by Calla Henkel and Mark von Schlegell accompany the drawings, weaving fictional threads through Shaw’s imagery and opening new narrative pathways. Together, text and image form a universe where scenes, characters, and ideas blur into one another, inviting readers to inhabit the imaginative terrain that drives Shaw’s relentlessly curious vision.

208 p, ills colour & bw, 17 x 24 cm, pb, English