Important Notice

Drawing from various disciplines including literature, zoology and art history, Raqib Shaw’s body of work is a dizzying amalgamation of influences, including the work of old Masters like Bosch, Holbein and Piranesi, Mughal miniatures, the Romantic works of Wordsworth, Byron and Coleridge, Japanese decorative arts, Kashmiri shawls, and various specimens and images drawn from natural history museums, medical journals and popular culture, to name... Drawing from various disciplines including literature, zoology and art history, Raqib Shaw’s body of work is a dizzying amalgamation of influences, including the work of old Masters like Bosch, Holbein and Piranesi, Mughal miniatures, the Romantic works of Wordsworth, Byron and Coleridge, Japanese decorative arts, Kashmiri shawls, and various specimens and images drawn from natural history museums, medical journals and popular culture, to name only a few.

As Homi Bhabha explains, “A first encounter with Raqib Shaw’s wondrous and wayward art leaves the viewer gasping for a mundane moment…Shaw propels the surface of his painting into new decorative dimensions and figurative heights – gold infills, diamond dust, enameled objects, the mangled memories of masterworks – while he explores the obscure depths of a personal mythology of life’s exigent and extreme experiences: sexual violence, ritual death, unrelieved anxiety, unbearable beauty” (“An Art of Exquisite Anxiety”, Absence of God, White Cube exhibition catalogue, London, 2009, p. 5).

In the present lot, an elaborately embellished work on paper, Shaw’s hybrid protagonists appear to be ancient fishermen, taking on a koi or Japanese carp of mythical proportions in an epic underwater battle. An extensively hybridized species itself, the fish, like its three predators and the floating bull’s head with butterfly wings that presides over the scene, is perhaps representative of the artist’s own ‘psychological un-rootedness’. As he explains, “As time passes, the boundary between reality and fantasy seems less clear, perhaps as I have come to understand that the perfect beauty of my native country exists only in my imagination” (as quoted in “Raqib Shaw in Conversation with Kunsthalle Wien”, Absence of God, White Cube exhibition catalogue, London, 2009, p. 105).

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