RAQIB SHAW

This exhibition is the culmination of two decades of the artist’s continual refinement and experimentation with Hammerite enamel paint-a dedication that has allowed Shaw to push the material beyond its traditional capabilities. Shaw has approached this material and his practice with a mentality resonant with the Japanese mindset of Monozukuri. For the latest paintings, Shaw initially swirled the paint around with matchstick splinters and pieces of wood, then porcupine quills, and finally fine needles attached to quills for the most detailed areas of the compositions. The result is a paint surface that appears both fragile and highly textured, encompassing an extravagant colour palette.

While grounded in the artist’s personal history in Kashmir, the new works also demonstrate Shaw’s careful study and appreciation of the tradition of Western landscape painting, including the work of masters Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Annibale Carraci, John Constable, Caspar David Friedrich, and Thomas Gainsborough. East meets West in Shaw’s final works fusing them with pictorial traditions of Persian and Mughal miniature paintings.

Autobiographical in nature, this exhibition presents Shaw’s experiences, observations, and memories of his life to the present date, with a particular focus on his early years spent in Kashmir before political unrest forced his family to relocate. Shaw referred to the series as: ‘A cathartic exercise to try to suture the wounds of separation from Kashmir.’

Although an artist of note, his work should be considered philosophically closer to that of Dubuffet and ‘outsider artists’ than being integral to the concerns of contemporary figuration.