Phil Shaw

Phil Shaw is an acclaimed British artist who creates hyperreal images of bookshelves. While visually stunning Shaw’s work is always rooted in a conceptual context. Each image plays with an idea: an idea that challenges our expectations and interrogates the changing place of the printed world in our digital age.

Book-titles (all genuine) ranged on a shelf might spell out a fairy story when read in sequence, or reveal the names of the stations on a line of the London Underground, or conceal the words of a Shakespeare soliloquy. Or some subtle slippage may have occurred, the familiar book titles altered to reveal new meanings or suggest new possibilities.

Shaw’s work is clever, beautiful, sometimes unsettling, and often very funny. These are pictures to explore and re-explore. Each encounter yields fresh discoveries.

During the Covid pandemic of 2020, his print – Shelf Isolation – became both a viral and real-world sensation. 

At a technical level, Shaw’s work is something exceptional: neither a painting nor a photograph but a contemporary re-fashioning, and combining, of the two media. His pictures are digitally-constructed images, painstakingly drawn by hand, and then printed using the densest water-based inks on very fine-grain Hahnemühle paper to achieve an extraordinary intensity of colour. 

Phil Shaw was born in Huddersfield in 1950. Having studied at the Royal College of Art, London, he taught printmaking for many years at Middlesex University, London.  

He has exhibited extensively since the 1970s. His work is often shown at the Royal Academy, London, and is held in numerous important collections, including the British Government Art Collection and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Foundation, Seattle, USA. His 2004 print, Fiction 3, was chosen as the ‘Print of the Year’ by the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers.’ In 2013, he was commissioned by the then British Prime Minister, David Cameron, to create a commemorative print for the world leaders gathered at the G8 Summit in the UK.