White Cube is pleased to present A Summer Among the Narcissi, an online exhibition of works on paper by Raqib Shaw. Featuring a new series of circular, enamel and pencil drawings, the presentation is titled after one of Shaw's favourite poems, Among the Narcissi by Sylvia Plath, which muses on man's relationship to nature and its ability to heal and nurture.
During the pandemic lockdown in 2020, Shaw set out to build an alpine rockery at his South London studio which was based on his childhood memories of the flora and fauna in the Karakoram mountains of Kashmir. After experimenting with its scenery and scale, this mountainous landscape-in-miniature became the subject for Shaw's new group of paintings and drawings which focus on the artist as a lone protagonist, set within allegorical, landscape scenes.
Shaw chose a circular format for his drawings in order to evoke a portal – not simply into their fantastical subject matter, but also into his inner thoughts and vivid imagination. Drawing on both reality and fantasy and his own conscious and subconscious thoughts and desires, Shaw's work synthesises many visual references into a unique, hybrid realm – one that is consistently proliferating and expanding across his work.
Shaw blends images taken from his own life into his subject matter, often drawing on recent events in fine detail or through visual metaphor, with a skilful draftsmanship and focused precision. His is a poetic and romantic world; a theatre whose significant moments are highlighted and staged with moods that deeply connect with his own psychological state of mind at the time of their making. This notion is particularly evident his group of circular self-portraits, which are chronological and can be read as points along a linear narrative of the artist's life.
This narrative could be considered to begin with the work Edgy Spring, in which Shaw depicts himself tending to his narcissi, sitting precariously, legs dangling on the edge of his rockery - here re-imagined as a huge cliff – and paying little attention to the ravine below. Despite the clusters of bright flora in the depths of the ravine, the work suggests a sense of foreboding, as if depicting the moment before a fall, or metaphorically conjuring up the of the cusp of some kind of momentous change in the man's existence.
The solemnity of Edgy Spring is counterbalanced by the work Sacred Summer in which the artist-as-gardener appears rewarded for his toils by a rich, luxuriant border of orange and red flowers, curving along the bottom of the image, nestled within a rocky terrain. Kneeling next to his faithful companion – a small dog, half-turned towards the viewer – the artist offers a trowel of soil to the heavens in a gesture of gratitude for nature's bounty.
The working clothes of Sacred Summer have been replaced in Harvest Moon by an elaborate kimono costume, worn by the melancholic artist as he cradles his dog and reads through a large, illustrated book – his first children’s story – under a pale, full moon. Portrayed deep in thought, the work draws on Shaw's own experience of childhood memories and the loss of one of his closest family members.
In Final Submersion, as an act of catharsis, the artist-as-gardener is depicted submerging his own Jamevar Shawl (a symbol of family and homeland which has appeared in many of Shaw's paintings) in a flowing stream. Watching the pattern of the shawl dissipate and migrate into the water, the artist seems to be bidding farewell to the pain of his past.
'My work has a diasporic sense, of leaving but also carrying the memory of a culture. It is an amalgamation, a hybrid, a cocktail.' (Studio International interview, 2016)
In contrast, in Only Hope, the artist, dressed again in elaborate kimono, has taken refuge inside an old woodshed, a reference to the figure of the Virgin Mary in Tintoretto’s The Adoration of the Shepherds (c. 1540). Rather than nursing a Christ figure, however, here the protagonist, sits on a bed of straw and waters his narcissi form a long, elegant, bronze watering can; an act laden with pathos and filled with an intense yet melancholic concentration. The narrative continues in Nurturing Hope: After Tintoretto’s Adoration of the Shepherds, in which the protagonist is depicted busy with the same activity, but now in a garden setting, amid a dazzling display of rhododendrons bordering a placid lake, whose surface is dotted with water-lilies.
Shaw has remarked that while his fantastical imagery is idiosyncratic, it can be considered a reflection on the sometimes painful journey of life and on the human condition:
“We certainly become what we think and steering towards positivity by embracing beauty in art and nature is the only way forward for me. Ultimately my paintings celebrate the resilience of man, the ability to transform sorrow into beauty and finally the acceptance of inevitable change that feeds the cycle of life itself”.