In 2018 Raqib Shaw was invited by Patrick Elliot, Senior Curator at the National Galleries of Scotland to exhibit in Edinburgh. Seven of Shaw’s paintings were selected by Elliot to be exhibited alongside two paintings from the gallery collection: Joseph Noel Paton’s The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania and Lucas Cranach’s An Allegory of Melancholy. Both paintings have a long-held fascination for Shaw, who in 2016 painted a homage to Paton’s extraordinary fairy picture so as to co-inside with a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Glyndebourne opera house in East Sussex. Then in February of 2017 in preparation for the Edinburgh exhibition Shaw took the opportunity to visit Scotland for the first time to research and respond to the Cranach painting.
Reinventing the Old Masters, Scottish National Gallery 2018.
Installation photograph courtesy Scottish National Gallery.
Artworks photographed by George Darrell, Ben Westoby, Ellen Kayley Broughton, Tom Powell, Stephen White and Prudence Cummings Associates.