The Reader: Phil Shaw

'In November 2003, I woke up one morning with the thought 'The Lust of the Mohicans' floating around in my mind. I wondered whether I could do something with this. A book, perhaps? A real book with a modified title, maybe? It wasn't long before 'The List of the Mohicans' popped into my head, and then a flood of similar textual interventions led me to think of creating a bookshelf, a print perhaps. Thus I made the first of the Fiction series, and from them a whole range of other bookshelf ideas followed on' - Shelf Obsession, Phil Shaw 

Phil Shaw is a ground-breaking British digital-printmaker, whose hyper-real ‘bookshelf’ prints interrogate the changing place of the printed word in a digital age, and the instability and transfer of meaning through intertextuality.

His work is exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy in London, as well as across twenty international art fairs a year.

He won the ‘Print of the Year’ from the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers in 2004, and was commissioned by David Cameron, the former British Prime Minister, to create a work of art for the world leaders at the 2013 G8 Summit. Shaw’s work was acquired by Paul Allen for the Vulcan Collection at both the 2016 and 2017 editions of the Seattle Art Fair, and 2017 also saw the publication of Shelf Obsession, a monograph on Shaw's work. Copies of the book will be on sale throughout the exhibition.