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Shongun XXII

Shongun XXII, 1978, Steel
Ernest Shaw (American, born 1942)
#1985.0002.0001

Ernest Shaw began his career not as an artist, but as a psychiatrist. Interested in using art as a mechanism for self-expression, many of his pieces are said to evoke certain kinds of psychological procedures, in which patients would re-orient themselves against convention, whether through a shift in habits or a change in social behavior.  Many of his pieces, such as this one, play with the ideas of center, gravity, and balance.