Untitled

Untitled

Jim Shaw

2003

ink

From the collection of Museum of Modern Art

About this work

This painting is a grid of small, ghostly figures trapped in a repeating pattern. Each figure looks like a half-erased drawing—blurry, smudged, and slightly transparent. The lines are dark and wavy, as if scribbled in haste, while the background is mostly pale with faint ink stains. The figures all face the same way, but their details fade into the white space around them. It’s like looking at a sheet of half-remembered sketches, overlapping and slightly blurred. Try looking up cross-hatching to see how artists build shadows with lines.

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