JONATHAN SHAW WITH JOE COLEMAN'S $29,500 "PORTRAIT OF JONATHAN SHAW" PHOTO BY MARK KRAMER

Tattooing's kinship to contemporary fine art is perhaps the most urgent issue driving the "Lords of The Lowbrow" group show that opened earlier this month at SoHo's Ozone Gallery. The presence of preeminent body artist Jonathan Shaw in this at-a-glance survey of pre-apocalyptic artsters Robert Williams, Joe Coleman, Gary Panter, Ron English, David Sandlin and Anthony Ausgang is an acknowledgment of how the tattoo "flash sheet" genre has joined comix and kustom kars as a determinant of today's visual ecology.

JONATHAN SHAW WITH HIS $13,500 "TATTOOED LADY" SCULPTURE PHOTO BY MARK KRAMER

This is Shaw's first major New York gallery appearance since the angst-drenched "Tattoo Flash" show he curated in 1991 at the now-defunct Psychedelic Solution artspace. On display at Ozone Gallery are five Shaw paintings and a single sculpture that collectively illustrate the artist's recombinant vision -- an experiential amalgam of his picaresque decades as tattooist, merchant seaman, world-traveler, scion of legendary clarinetist/band leader/ladies' man Artie Shaw, and nephew/apprentice to second-generation carnival tattooist Bob Shaw.

The life-size, heavily laquered-and-appliqued Tattooed Lady [priced at $13,500], and such explosive acrylics as Mambo Over Miami [$6400], reveal the free-hand, worldbeat-enriched line with which Shaw liberates the tattoo idiom from the "folk art" ghetto, resurrecting it into the arena of social and cultural discourse.

Although plugged into the high-gloss worlds of movies, celebrities and magazine publishing, Shaw remains true to his roots in the subcultural preterite of hog-ridin' desperados, wharf rats, flyin' fuckin' A-heads and others cutting life close to the bone. This principle also applies to painters Robert Williams and Joe Coleman, two others in this show who are especially expressive of that "low" or "lowbrow" dimension. Williams' twisted biomorphic Cubism arrives via the California gothic of hotrods, burger joints and the psychedelia that followed; Coleman offers up a veiny, chunk-blown, intricately haunted cosmology that commingles a half-millenium of angry art -- ranging from Hieronymous Bosch to Ivan Albright [best known for creating the deliquescent image in the film The Portrait of Dorian Gray].

One particularly self-referential highlight of "Lords of The Lowbrow" is Joe Coleman's Portrait of Jonathan Shaw [$29,500], depicting the tattooist's personal story cycle -- a narrative of the global bodyart network echoed in the look and feel of these times...and in the tattoo-derived iconography that Shaw has made incorruptibly his own.

"Lords of The Lowbrow" is on exhibit at the Ozone Gallery through October 31.