Background

Raqib Shaw was born in 1974 in Calcutta, India, but spent much of his youth in Kashmir, where he was influenced by the multi-ethnic cultural environment. In 1989 political unrest began to grow in Kashmir, eventually driving the Shaw family to relocate to New Delhi in 1992.

Education

Shaw received both his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts from Central Saint Martins School of Art.

Career

From 1992 to 1998 Shaw worked for his maternal uncle in the family business in India, an activity that ranged from interior design, architecture, to selling jewelry, antiques, carpets, and fabrics. Family business brought him to London in 1993, where he was able to see the paintings at the National Gallery for the first time. This encounter convinced him to spend the rest of his life in England as a practicing artist.

After graduation from Central Saint Martins School of Art Raqib was talent-spotted by the art dealer Victoria Miro, and since then has shown at Tate Britain in London (2006), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2008), Manchester Art Gallery (2013), Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (2013), and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2018). His exhibition at The Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester, United Kingdom (2017) was reimagined for the Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, in 2018.

Achievements

• Raqib Shaw is known for his paintings of fantastical worlds. His most famous work is The Garden of Earthly Delights, which caught the attention of the London Contemporary Art scene in 2004. Titled after the triptych of Hieronymus Bosch, the series depicts a fantastical underwater world populated by hybrid creatures often engaged in violent and sexual acts.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Iris

  • Untitled

  • Arched Blossom Gatherer

  • Childhood from the Four Seasons

  • Self portrait in the study at Peckham

  • Death, Beauty and Justice

  • The Mild-Eyed Melancholy of the Lotus Eater

  • Arrival of the Horse King

  • Henry VIII

  • The Piranesi triptych

  • Death, Beauty, Justice

  • Untitled

  • Chrysanthemum and bee

  • Hanga irises and grasshopper

  • Cheetah and Stag with Two Indians

  • Reinventing the Old Masters

  • Twilight Painting

  • The Mild-Eyed Melancholy of The Lotus Eaters II

  • An Ode to the Dissolving Silk of Dusk

  • After the Garden of Earthly Delights

  • Untitled

Views

Though Shaw initially struggled with painting, his early experiments with a number of materials, namely enamel, household and car paint, bought from a local branch of Leyland, were to set the foundation for his technique of manipulating pools of industrial paint with a porcupine quill.

Today his works reveal an eclectic fusion of influences - from Persian carpets and Northern Renaissance painting to industrial materials and Japanese lacquerware - and are often developed in series from literary, art historical, and mystical sources.

References

• Raqib Shaw: Of Beasts and Super-Beasts This volume is published for Shaw's first solo show in Paris.
  2016
• Raqib Shaw: Reinventing the Old Masters This breathtakingly intricate, beautiful book accompanies an exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and extensive publicity surrounding it.
  2018