"We are delighted to partner with the Frist Art Museum and the Isabella Gardner Museum to bring this mesmerizing exhibition to The Huntington and present Raqib Shaw's first solo museum exhibition on the West coast," said Christina Nielsen, Hannah and Russel Kully Director of the Art Museum. "Shaw's luminous painting, which are deeply influenced by and often directly responding to world-renowned Old master artwork, will be shown in conversation with the masterpieces in The Huntington's historical art collection.
The exhibition's cornerstone work, The Retrospective (2002-2022), includes 60 miniature versions of Shaw's paintings and sculptures in a reworking of Giovanni Paolo Panini's Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome (1757). Shaw stands atop a stack of packing crates marked "Fragile, while wearing a Venetian Carnival mask and triumphantly holding a toilet plunger over his head like a wand. Positioning himself in conversation with the Old Masters in this manner, Shaw acknowledges the absurdity and gravity of an artist attempting to grapple with the beauty and pain of existence.
His richly patterned surfaces of lush landscapes and imagined interior spaces-vividly created by a unique enameled painting technique-suspend time and place, presenting dreamlike scenes of simultaneous euphoria and melancholy. In Ode to the Country without a Post office (2019-20), the artist stages a poignant tribute to the land he left behind. Seated on a sumptuously patterned Kishmiri carpet, Shaw orchestrates a fluttering swirl of fireflies. The violence behind hm references the sectarian turmoil in Kashmir that continues to devastate his homeland. The hot orange flames in the city of Srinagar contrast starkly with the fireflies ascending into the iridescent sunset to meet the circling waplanes.
For the touring exhibition's presentation at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and The Huntington, Shaw transformed The Perseverant Prophet and The Pragmatic Pessimist, two works from his Space Between Dream series, into tapestries, which is the new medium for the artist. Shaw created the tapestries specifically for the Huntington Art Gallery's upper register for the grand staircase, after he was inspired to produce a work for the unique space during a site visit to the museum. The Perseverant Prophet merges two historical paintings-Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Tower of Babel (1563) and John Martin's The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (1822)- to depict an apocalyptic landscape with flames and chaos. The Pragmatic Pessimist reflects on mortality and the precarious state of the planet, showing an otherwordly winter palace and polar bears on melting ice. Both works convey Shaw's reflections on the chaotic and challenging aspect of the world today.
"Raqib Shaw : Ballads of East and West" was first presented at the Frist Art Museum from Sep. 15 through Dec. 31, 2023, followed by presentations at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum from Feb. 15 through May 12, 2024, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston from June 9 through Sept. 2, 2024.