In July 2016 White Cube Bermondsey presented an exhibition of new paintings and sculpture by Raqib Shaw. This exhibition included a series of paintings referencing, in part, Old Masters from the collections of the National Gallery, London, and Prado Museum, Madrid, as well as three new bronze sculptures that recall the style of the Renaissance Mannerist period.
“In the new series of paintings, the most autobiographical to date, Shaw borrows compositions from 15th, 16th and 17th century Old Master paintings, including works by Girolamo Mocetto, Ludovico Mazzolino, Antonello da Messina, Carlo Crivelli, Marcello Venusti, Jan Gossaert and Hendrick van Steenwyck the Younger. Rendering their classical architecture with exacting detail, Shaw transforms the religious scenes of the originals by bringing in elements of his Peckham studio, the landscape of his childhood home in Kashmir, Hindu iconography and Japanese architecture. Shaw’s new bronze sculptures, based on Mannerist sculpture, which itself used iconography from Classical Antiquity, respond to the freedom, movement and exuberance of these forms and the conflation of internal and external modes of being. The sculptures are made using the lost wax casting technique, and use a patina which is exactly the same as that used by Renaissance sculptors.” – White Cube.
Raqib Shaw: Self Portraits, White Cube 2016.
Installation photographed by Ben Westoby, courtesy White Cube, London · Hong Kong.
Artworks photographed by Prudence Cummings Associates and Ben Westoby.