BOSTON, MASS.- Fantastical paintings encompassing an eclectic fusion of the natural world, global artistic influences and memory are the core of Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West, on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum from February 15 – May 12, 2024. The exhibition features the puzzle-like paintings of London-based Kashmiri artist, Raqib Shaw, who blends Eastern and Western cultures to conjure a paradise in the wake of violence and displacement. To create his intricate compositions – populated with vibrant flowers, hybrid beasts and snow-capped mountains – Shaw uses porcupine quills and fine needles to manipulate glossy enamel and metallic paint outlined in embossed gold, usually onto birch wood panels. Shaw incorporates a range of literary, art historical, and spiritual references in his work.

“Raqib Shaw’s love of Asian art and European Old Masters, his fascination with textiles and patterning, his interest in horticulture and natural detail, even his profound relationship to his dog, all find a kinship in Isabella Stewart Gardner’s life and passions. It is thrilling to show Raqib’s work in the context of the Gardner Museum and to discover the utopias and dystopias that he so artfully envisions. Every visitor will find their own personal meaning in his work, just as they do in the Museum’s wide-ranging collection,” says Peggy Fogelman, Norma Jean Calderwood Director of the Gardner Museum.

Raqib Shaw was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, in 1974, and grew up in the valley of Kashmir, surrounded by gardens, lakes and the Himalayan mountains – a place that he remembers as paradise on earth. Due to growing religious tensions and violent insurgencies, Shaw’s family relocated to New Delhi in 1992, before moving to London in 1997. Shaw’s paintings are deeply self-reflective, filled with associations to the beauty and trauma of his childhood.

Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West brings together more than twenty works from private and museum collections worldwide. The exhibition was co-organized by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, TN, and co-curated with Dr. Zehra Jumabhoy. The Gardner Museum is the second stop for the exhibition, following the Frist Art Museum (where it was on view September 15 – December 31). The exhibition will travel from Boston to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in Texas (June 9 – September 2, 2024) and The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California (November 16, 2024 – March 3, 2025).

For the Gardner presentation, Shaw’s works unfold across the entire Museum – predominantly in the Hostetter Gallery (second floor of the new building), but also in the Fenway Gallery (first floor of the palace), which focuses on the artist’s process. A new work, commissioned by the Gardner, is on view on the new building’s façade.

Hostetter Gallery

The main space of the exhibition features seventeen paintings and one sculpture spanning the last twelve years of Shaw’s career. The artist’s works contain many recurring components – references to historic masterpieces, self-portraiture, and autobiographical moments. Shaw takes inspiration from iconic Renaissance paintings, infusing their narratives with Asian motifs – ranging from sumptuously-patterned Kashmiri carpets to luminous Japanese lacquerware. In his self-portraits, Shaw depicts himself in a variety of guises – as saint, satyr, joker, philosopher, as well as a blue-skinned Hindu deity – often with Kashmir in peril in the background.

“There’s something that binds everything together … beauty. I do believe that it has a soul- cleansing and a calming quality and an uplifting quality that is rather primordial. I don’t think that that’ll ever change,” shares Raqib Shaw.

Upon entering the first of the two rooms in Hostetter Gallery, visitors will encounter five canvases of infinite colors depicting vivid environments. Autumn and Winter are from the artist's series, The Four Seasons (2018-19), in which the progression of seasons act as metaphors for the four stages of life. Also on view is A Summer of Sombre Stirrings in the Garden of Blissful Solitude (2021–22), a scene that appears blissfully bucolic, until one looks closer to find signs of impending menace. Inspired by Tintoretto, When the Thing with Feathers Turned Red, is a dramatic composition, divided into two halves, with both upper and lower sides engulfed in fiery orange flames.

In the main gallery, Shaw’s recently created La Tempesta (After Giorgione) (2019–21) finds its inspiration from Giorgione’s The Tempest (about 1508), considered one of the Italian Renaissance’s most enigmatic masterworks. In Shaw’s interpretation, he blows a transparent “memory bubble” filled with the idyllic scene of peacefully flowering trees, while a brutally different reality of the burning city of Srinagar rages behind him.

“This is Raqib Shaw’s first major survey in North America,” explains Pieranna Cavalchini, exhibition co-curator and the Gardner Museum’s Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art. “It is very exciting for us to share his multi-cultural, multi-faceted and exquisitely crafted work with audiences in Boston and across the United States.”

Shaw’s cornerstone work, The Retrospective (2002-22), depicts more than 60 miniaturized versions of his own paintings and sculptures, including many that surround it in this exhibition. This painting reimagines the eighteenth-century picture gallery by Italian artist Giovanni Paolo Panini, Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome (1757), from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In the midst of Shaw’s invented picture gallery, the artist stands atop a stack of packing crates marked “Fragile” wearing a Venetian carnival mask and ceremonial kimono. He triumphantly and satirically waves a toilet plunger over his head like an orchestra conductor directing a symphony.

The only three-dimensional work in the exhibition is the jewel-encrusted sculpture, Small Adam (2011). This painted bronze encompasses a hybrid man-beast – a gory bird attached to a representation of Shaw – being ravished by a gem-encrusted lobster. Located in the right corner of The Retrospective, the sculpture seems to be almost tumbling out of the painting into the exhibition space.

Anatomy of a Painting, Fenway Gallery

In the Fenway Gallery, adjacent to the Museum’s Courtyard, visitors will gain a deeper understanding of Shaw’s creative process that combines memories and art historical references to trace his personal story of beauty and loss. The gallery, evocative of the artist’s studio, features the finished painting, The Departure (after Tintoretto) (2021–22), as well as some of the artist’s tools, objects of inspiration (like books and a small golden pagoda), photographs of staged performances by the artist on which drawings are later based, preparatory sketches, tracings, and watercolors for the painting.

This painting reimagines the Italian artist Tintoretto’s Presentation of the Virgin (1556). In Tintoretto’s work, Mary ascends a staircase to dedicate her life to serving God. In Shaw’s interpretation, Mr. C, the artist’s beloved Jack Russell Terrier, who passed away last year, is surrounded by celestial light.

The Perseverant Prophet (2023), Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade, February 6 – June 4, 2024

The Gardner Museum commissioned Shaw to create a site-specific public art work for its Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade on Evans Way. In The Perseverant Prophet, Shaw uses Peter Bruegel the Elder’s The Tower of Babel (1563) as a point of departure. Flames engulf the tower and the surrounding Himalayan landscape, igniting a pile of art history books. On the left, the artist Raqib Shaw fights the conflagration with a Japanese parasol, never surrendering to catastrophe in the face of perpetual chaos and seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

Publication / Gift at the Gardner

In conjunction with the traveling exhibition, a publication of the same name has been produced by the Gardner Museum with the Frist Art Museum and curator Dr. Zehra Jumabhoy. The book is available at Gift at the Gardner along with other products featuring Shaw’s artwork or evocative of his style and inspirations, like cloisonne giftware, lacquer boxes, and textiles with whimsical Indian illustrations.

More about the artist

Shaw lives and works in London, in his studio and home surrounded by the gardens that he has created and nurtured over many years. Shaw has had solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, 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, UK (2017) was reimagined for the Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, the following year.