Jamie Shovlin (b. 1978, London, UK) lives and works in London, UK. He received a MA from the Royal College of Art and a BA from Loughborough University School of Art & Design. The artist is represented in the United States by Horton Gallery and Unosunove in Rome, IT.
Jamie Shovlin is interested in the tension between truth and fiction, reality and invention, history and memory. His projects are long-term engagements with painstaking research applied to working practices specific to each particular project and its focus. Artificial distancing mechanisms are employed within work that seeks to confound and subjugate the role of author, originator and practitioner. These often take the form of literary or filmic traditions including unreliable narration, alternate realities, multiple accounts of the same event, and meta-commentary. His work attempts to merge inherently flawed systems, pseudo-scientific exactitude and doubtful philosophical propositions with the seemingly objective experience of the archive.
Notable Exhibitions:
Thy Will Be Done, Tillie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, Cumbria, UK
Hiker Meat, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome, IT
The Nature of Our Business, Outpost, Norwich, UK
We’re Moving, RCA Sackler Building, London, UK
To Do, IKSV, Parallel Event Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, TK
Distortion, Gervasuti Foundation, Venice, IT
Birdland - An Artist's Imaginary Aviary, Salisbury Arts Centre, Wales, UK
Bookish: When Books Become Art, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, IE
Aggregate, City Gallery, Leicester, UK and ArtSway, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, UK and Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, UK
Alchemy, Manchester Museum, Manchester, UK
Memory and Monument, Artist’s Space, New York
The Myth of Reality, Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham, UK
In Search of Perfect Harmony,Tate Britain, Art Now, London, UK
Beck’s Futures, ICA London, UK; CCA Glasgow, UK; and Arnolfini, Bristol, UK
After the Fact, Tillie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, Cumbria, UK
Galleon and Other Stories, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK
Artfutures, Contemporary Art Society, City of London School, London, UK
Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2003, Cornerhouse, London, UK
Press Mentions:
Jamie Shovlin’s exhibition lingers over the exterior appearance of a famous series of paperbacks, the Fontana Modern Masters, which was launched in 1970. In these compact books, leading intellectuals expound the ideas of defining thinkers of the modern world such as Saussure and Marx. The books, in their original 1970s incarnation, had abstract covers with strong graphic designs that reflected their claim to reveal the heights of modern thought to a general readership. Now, Shovlin has lavished art on them. He shows prints of the Fontana covers, a collection of working tools and research materials to do with them, and creates large-scale painting replicas, methodically, accurately imitated. The results are thought-provoking. Is Shovlin suggesting that in modern culture the image has replaced the idea? – Jonathan Jones, “Jamie Shovlin, Michelangelo and Jeremy Deller’s bouncy Stonehenge – The Week in Art,” The Guardian, April 20, 2012.
Jamie Shovlin’s new exhibition at the “Haunch of Venison” is at once an homage to these covers but also a strange and beguiling experiment in graphic and reputational codefication. Titled 'Various Arrangements', the 17 large-scale paintings in the exhibition are of Modern Masters editions that never were, titles slated for appearance that got lost along the way. – Nick Compton, “Jamie Shovlin Exhibition at Haunch of Venison, London,” Wallpaper, April 20, 2012.
“Yet this is not a series of practical jokes designed to make the cognoscenti look foolish; rather Shovlin’s work occupies a rarely traversed zone between truth and fiction, creating pieces that force viewers to question both what they’re actually seeing, as well as the established criteria they use to accept a thing as real.” – Tish Wrigley, “Culture Talks—Jamie Shovlin,” AnOther, April 19, 2012.
“His ambitious 'Naomi V Jelish' project was an intricate, three-year-in-the-making hoax of a long lost artist. It was a project that Charles Saatchi was so enamoured with, he bought the whole collection not knowing that Naomi was a Shovlin creation. Much like his faux-German glam rock band Lustfaust, another project chronicling a band who never existed through prints, paintings, websites and even a live show to celebrate the opening of Haunch of Venison's Berlin outpost.” Terrence Teh, “Dazed Live: Jamie Shovlin & Ned Beauman,” Dazed, April 2011.
“In Jesus Rinzoli’s 1980 horror film "Hiker Meat," a hitchhiking woman gets ensnared in a cult that worships a giant lactating worm. Dark basements are explored, lustful impulses indulged, young bodies disemboweled. But you can’t see "Hiker Meat," because it doesn’t quite exist. An invention of the London-based artist Jamie Shovlin, 32, and collaborators Euan Rodger (who wrote the score) and Mike Harte (who wrote the story and titled the film by scrambling the letters of his name), "Hiker Meat" is also the name of an evolving exhibition that includes the film’s shooting script, costume designs, props, and poster art.” – Lawrence Levi. “Cine-File: Don’t Look Now,” Modern Painters, March 14, 2011.
“Lustfaust, a little-known German noise band from the 1970's, never existed, but you'd never know it from the New York debut of Jamie Shovlin, a British artist who is pushing trompe l'oeil Conceptualism in new directions. Mr. Shovlin has assiduously reconstructed Lustfaust's history from scratch. His handiwork, conducted in collaboration with Mike Harte and Murray Ward, who are real musicians, includes a CD sampling 72 songs, an elaborate Web site (with links) and even an entry in Wikipedia that sternly warns, ''This section cites no sources or references.''” – Roberta Smith, “Art in Review; Lustfaust –A Folk Anthology, 1976-1981,” The New York Times, July 21, 2006.
“You remember Lustfaust, a sort of hybrid of Bowie and Roxy Music with a touch of typically German electronica. Well, actually you don't remember them, because they never existed. The exhibit by one of the Beck's runners-up, British conceptual artist Jamie Shovlin, is a fake.” – David Lister, “You Couldn’t Make it up – But They Do,” The Independent, May 6, 2006.
“And how should we rate the works of a 13-year-old girl called Naomi V Jelish, snapped up by the great collector Charles Saatchi, but now known to have been produced by a Leicester art student, Jamie Shovlin? The pictures were said to have been found in an abandoned house by a teacher at Naomi's school called John Ivesmail, a name Mr Saatchi belatedly noticed was, like Naomi V Jelish, an anagram of Jamie Shovlin.” – “Forging Ahead,” The Guardian, July 9, 2004.
Notable Collections:
Hiscox Collection, London, UK
The Manchester Museum, Manchester, UK
David Roberts Foundation, London, UK
Saatchi Gallery, London, UK
Elspeth and Imogen Turner Collection, London, UK
Jamie Shovlin is interested in the tension between truth and fiction, reality and invention, history and memory. His projects are long-term engagements with painstaking research applied to working practices specific to each particular project and its focus. Artificial distancing mechanisms are employed within work that seeks to confound and subjugate the role of author, originator and practitioner. These often take the form of literary or filmic traditions including unreliable narration, alternate realities, multiple accounts of the same event, and meta-commentary. His work attempts to merge inherently flawed systems, pseudo-scientific exactitude and doubtful philosophical propositions with the seemingly objective experience of the archive.
Notable Exhibitions:
Thy Will Be Done, Tillie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, Cumbria, UK
Hiker Meat, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome, IT
The Nature of Our Business, Outpost, Norwich, UK
We’re Moving, RCA Sackler Building, London, UK
To Do, IKSV, Parallel Event Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, TK
Distortion, Gervasuti Foundation, Venice, IT
Birdland - An Artist's Imaginary Aviary, Salisbury Arts Centre, Wales, UK
Bookish: When Books Become Art, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, IE
Aggregate, City Gallery, Leicester, UK and ArtSway, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, UK and Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, UK
Alchemy, Manchester Museum, Manchester, UK
Memory and Monument, Artist’s Space, New York
The Myth of Reality, Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham, UK
In Search of Perfect Harmony,Tate Britain, Art Now, London, UK
Beck’s Futures, ICA London, UK; CCA Glasgow, UK; and Arnolfini, Bristol, UK
After the Fact, Tillie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, Cumbria, UK
Galleon and Other Stories, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK
Artfutures, Contemporary Art Society, City of London School, London, UK
Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2003, Cornerhouse, London, UK
Press Mentions:
Jamie Shovlin’s exhibition lingers over the exterior appearance of a famous series of paperbacks, the Fontana Modern Masters, which was launched in 1970. In these compact books, leading intellectuals expound the ideas of defining thinkers of the modern world such as Saussure and Marx. The books, in their original 1970s incarnation, had abstract covers with strong graphic designs that reflected their claim to reveal the heights of modern thought to a general readership. Now, Shovlin has lavished art on them. He shows prints of the Fontana covers, a collection of working tools and research materials to do with them, and creates large-scale painting replicas, methodically, accurately imitated. The results are thought-provoking. Is Shovlin suggesting that in modern culture the image has replaced the idea? – Jonathan Jones, “Jamie Shovlin, Michelangelo and Jeremy Deller’s bouncy Stonehenge – The Week in Art,” The Guardian, April 20, 2012.
Jamie Shovlin’s new exhibition at the “Haunch of Venison” is at once an homage to these covers but also a strange and beguiling experiment in graphic and reputational codefication. Titled 'Various Arrangements', the 17 large-scale paintings in the exhibition are of Modern Masters editions that never were, titles slated for appearance that got lost along the way. – Nick Compton, “Jamie Shovlin Exhibition at Haunch of Venison, London,” Wallpaper, April 20, 2012.
“Yet this is not a series of practical jokes designed to make the cognoscenti look foolish; rather Shovlin’s work occupies a rarely traversed zone between truth and fiction, creating pieces that force viewers to question both what they’re actually seeing, as well as the established criteria they use to accept a thing as real.” – Tish Wrigley, “Culture Talks—Jamie Shovlin,” AnOther, April 19, 2012.
“His ambitious 'Naomi V Jelish' project was an intricate, three-year-in-the-making hoax of a long lost artist. It was a project that Charles Saatchi was so enamoured with, he bought the whole collection not knowing that Naomi was a Shovlin creation. Much like his faux-German glam rock band Lustfaust, another project chronicling a band who never existed through prints, paintings, websites and even a live show to celebrate the opening of Haunch of Venison's Berlin outpost.” Terrence Teh, “Dazed Live: Jamie Shovlin & Ned Beauman,” Dazed, April 2011.
“In Jesus Rinzoli’s 1980 horror film "Hiker Meat," a hitchhiking woman gets ensnared in a cult that worships a giant lactating worm. Dark basements are explored, lustful impulses indulged, young bodies disemboweled. But you can’t see "Hiker Meat," because it doesn’t quite exist. An invention of the London-based artist Jamie Shovlin, 32, and collaborators Euan Rodger (who wrote the score) and Mike Harte (who wrote the story and titled the film by scrambling the letters of his name), "Hiker Meat" is also the name of an evolving exhibition that includes the film’s shooting script, costume designs, props, and poster art.” – Lawrence Levi. “Cine-File: Don’t Look Now,” Modern Painters, March 14, 2011.
“Lustfaust, a little-known German noise band from the 1970's, never existed, but you'd never know it from the New York debut of Jamie Shovlin, a British artist who is pushing trompe l'oeil Conceptualism in new directions. Mr. Shovlin has assiduously reconstructed Lustfaust's history from scratch. His handiwork, conducted in collaboration with Mike Harte and Murray Ward, who are real musicians, includes a CD sampling 72 songs, an elaborate Web site (with links) and even an entry in Wikipedia that sternly warns, ''This section cites no sources or references.''” – Roberta Smith, “Art in Review; Lustfaust –A Folk Anthology, 1976-1981,” The New York Times, July 21, 2006.
“You remember Lustfaust, a sort of hybrid of Bowie and Roxy Music with a touch of typically German electronica. Well, actually you don't remember them, because they never existed. The exhibit by one of the Beck's runners-up, British conceptual artist Jamie Shovlin, is a fake.” – David Lister, “You Couldn’t Make it up – But They Do,” The Independent, May 6, 2006.
“And how should we rate the works of a 13-year-old girl called Naomi V Jelish, snapped up by the great collector Charles Saatchi, but now known to have been produced by a Leicester art student, Jamie Shovlin? The pictures were said to have been found in an abandoned house by a teacher at Naomi's school called John Ivesmail, a name Mr Saatchi belatedly noticed was, like Naomi V Jelish, an anagram of Jamie Shovlin.” – “Forging Ahead,” The Guardian, July 9, 2004.
Notable Collections:
Hiscox Collection, London, UK
The Manchester Museum, Manchester, UK
David Roberts Foundation, London, UK
Saatchi Gallery, London, UK
Elspeth and Imogen Turner Collection, London, UK
Photo: Courtesy of the artist