Raqib Shaw

Raqib Shaw was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1974 and spent much of his childhood in Kashmir before relocating to London in 1998, where he completed an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2002. That confluence of origins — the subcontinent, the Himalayan valley, and the British capital — runs through every dimension of his practice, which fuses ornamental density, literary mythology, and a deeply personal engagement with memory and loss into paintings of extraordinary visual complexity.

Shaw works primarily in enamel-based paint, building surfaces of jewel-like intricacy that draw simultaneously on Persian miniature traditions, European Old Master iconography, and the natural world rendered at hallucinatory scale. The Absence of God series, produced between 2008 and 2009, marked a significant conceptual and stylistic shift in his work — a turn, recognized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, away from earlier Holbein-related imagery toward more metaphysical and existential terrain. That transition set the stage for Paradise Lost, a twenty-one-panel painting cycle begun in 2009 and extending over more than one hundred feet, which the Art Institute of Chicago has described as Shaw's most ambitious and personal project to date, drawing on memories of Kashmir, landscape, and political rupture. The full cycle is presented at the Art Institute of Chicago in a solo exhibition running from 2025 into 2026.

Shaw's exhibition history spans some of the most prominent institutions in the world. He has held solo presentations at Tate Britain, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Ca' Pesaro in Venice, and Deitch Projects in New York, among many others. His traveling retrospective Ballads of East and West, featuring works from 2009 to 2023, toured the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and The Huntington in San Marino. Gallery relationships have included White Cube, Victoria Miro Gallery, Pace Gallery, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, with whom he has shown in both Paris and Salzburg. His work is held in the permanent collections of Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, and the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul.