Executed in intricate detail, with as much attention paid to materiality and surface as to imagery, Raqib Shaw's works envision a contemporary garden of earthly delights.
Read MoreShaw's paintings feature vibrant tones, bejewelled surfaces, and striking intricacy, recalling the artist's influences of Eastern decorative arts, including Japanese lacquerware, prints, textiles, and architecture, as well as Persian miniatures, carpets, and jewellery. Shaw additionally cites Renaissance and Old Masters paintings, 18th-century English literature, ancient India, and Hindu iconography as enduring artistic influences.
These influences are exemplified in Shaw's 2004 exhibition, Garden of Earthly Delights at London's Victoria Miro Gallery. Referencing Hieronymus Bosch's 16th-century painting of the same title, the show delivered a series of coded narratives rendered in psychedelic, sexually charged paintings and drawings. The titular work, The Garden of Earthly Delights III (2003), unveils an erotic underwater fantasy across a 10-by-15-foot triptych, inhabited by an array of real and hybridised mythical creatures—a giant shrimp fornicates with a man on a bed of seaweed; a shark engages in self-pleasure; an octopus smothers a human body; a porn-star-inspired toucan king stands assuredly. Perversely anthropomorphised, Shaw's creatures represent a surreal, theatrical aestheticisation of human nature and desire.
Shaw uses a range of media in his paintings, including automotive and industrial paints, glossy enamels, glitter, and inlaid semiprecious stones, with additional surface texture created using his signature tool—a porcupine quill. In The Garden of Earthly Delights III, the quill adds further dimension to textural elements, such as the beds of coral and anemones, while select creatures are encrusted with Kashmir sapphires or aquamarine gemstones.
Shaw's obsessive attention to surface enhances the transportive, subversive nature of his paintings. He states: 'In looking at my work I want people to believe in the possibility of transcendence, that base metal might be turned into gold, or, as Proust eloquently wrote, to reveal "the pearl that may give the lie to our carapace of paste and pewter."'
Shaw's later practice more overtly incorporates personal narratives. Landscapes of Kashmir, Shaw's 2019 exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York, brought together a new series of paintings drawing from the artist's childhood memories of his hometown. Recollecting Kashmir and the Indian subcontinent's natural landscapes and architecture, Shaw reimagines and mythologises personal histories, weaving them with art historical narratives in epic scenes packed with iconography and painterly excess, executed in kaleidescopic colour. 'The Four Seasons' (2018—2019), a series of four large square-format paintings, envisages a fantastical Kashmir landscape across the seasons; while From Narcissus to Icarus (After Déjeuner sur l'herbe) (2017—2019) brings together mythology, Édouard Manet's canonical painting, and cultural iconography in an embellished Kashmiri forest scene.
On Landscapes of Kashmir, Daniel Creahan wrote for Art Observed: '... Shaw's re-creation of both natural and man-made iconographies presents a world in which the mythic narrative man has built for the world is subtly caught up in the landscape's own sense [of] supernatural wonder. Even as the artist's images explode with vivid, overwhelming images of man knocked to the ground by the grandeur of the supernatural, the world in which these images are produced, and man's relation to it, is always close at hand.'
Shaw also works in sculpture and drawing. His cast bronze sculptures give physical form to his hybrid creatures, such as Nonet (2016) or Centaur Trio (2016), while referencing the tradition of classical figurative sculpture.
In 2019, Raqib Shaw collaborated with French luxury fashion house Dior for the brand's 'Dior Lady Art' initiative, in which the artist created his own designs for the iconic Lady Dior handbag. Shaw's interpretations saw the Lady Dior adorned with ornate charms and floral motifs in a cloisonné-inspired style seen in his paintings.
