Frist Art Museum Presents RAQIB SHAW: BALLADS OF EAST AND WEST

The Frist Art Museum presents Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West, an exhibition of intricate paintings of dream-like, mysterious realms that blend Eastern and Western influences. Organized by the Frist Art Museum and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the exhibition will be on view in the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery from September 15 through December 31, 2023.

Raqib Shaw was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, in 1974, but spent most of his childhood in the beautiful Valley of Kashmir—a long-disputed territory that has been marked by sectarian strife that peaked in the 1990s and continues today. Shaw relocated to New Delhi in 1992 and was immersed in his family's business of selling jewelry, textiles, and carpets. On a trip to London in 1993, he fell in love with the old masters' paintings at the National Gallery; he eventually moved to the city in 1998 to study art and has lived there ever since. Throughout his career as an artist, Shaw has created mesmerizing images, in which references to Western art history are seamlessly combined with Asian ornamental aesthetics and philosophical traditions.

Subverting geographical boundaries, Shaw blurs the lines between art and ornament—Japanese aesthetics, Mughal artifacts, Islamic textiles and Indo-Persian architecture converge with citations from Renaissance Masters. Painting with porcupine quills and fine needles, he renders the precise details of objects from flowers to distant mountains, which are outlined in embossed gold. Jewels, glitter, and semiprecious stones further enhance the sublime opulence of the scenes, beguiling viewers through the iridescent shimmer of their surfaces, even as they are haunted by the sadness that lurks beneath the glamour. Upon closer examination, conflict is present in almost every painting, calling to mind Kashmir's turbulent history. 

Thursday, September 14
Artist's Perspective: Raqib Shaw
6:30 p.m.
Auditorium
Free; first come, first seated

Join Raqib Shaw for this talk celebrating the opening of Ballads of East and West. Shaw will discuss the history and development of his unique painting technique and practice of placing melancholic self-portraits within fantastic landscapes and architecture, in which motifs and compositions from the European Renaissance are combined with elements of the arts of Japan, Persia, and India.