Raqib Shaw's art exhibit to be held at the Houston Fine Arts Museum

April 4 :
"Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West" will be on display at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts from June 9th, 2024, until September 2nd, 2024. Exhibiting his elaborate paintings, Raqib Shaw is a London-based artist renowned for fusing Eastern and Western influences. The exhibition is co-organized by the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

"Raqib Shaw's universe is revealed through the memory of childhood experience in the extraordinarily beautiful Valley of Kashmir, the tragic history of modern Kashmir, and his knowledge and appreciation of the history of art both Western and Eastern," exclaimed Gary Tinterow, Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The centrepiece piece of the exhibition, Retrospective 2002–2022, is a reinterpretation of Giovanni Paolo Panini's renowned trio of paintings from the 1750s, Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome, comprised of sixty miniature reproductions of Shaw's own artworks.

"When like-minded souls meet, there is neither East nor West," says Dr. Zehra Jumabhoy of the University of Bristol's Department of Art History, adding, "even if they come from the ends of the earth!" This contradicts what Raqib Shaw is inspired by in Kipling's song. Shaw makes a powerful statement by demonstrating that this "meeting" may be artistically combined with impressive outcomes.

Though Raqib Shaw was born in India's Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1974, he grew up in Kashmir. By drawing inspiration from a wide range of sources, including Islamic fabrics, Indo-Persian architecture, Japanese aesthetics, Mughal artefacts, and more, Shaw creates paintings that muddle the boundaries between art and decoration. Jewels, glitter, and semiprecious stones adorn his creations, which are already lavish and beautiful, and he uses unconventional methods like painting with porcupine quills and tiny needles.

The organisers claim that audiences will meet Shaw in the role of protagonist, seen in a variety of locations that reflect the tumultuous history of Kashmir by combining aspects of opulence with hints of evil and strife. Raqib Shaw's paintings evoke a mix of allure and unease. Alison de Lima Greene, Isabel Brown Wilson curator of modern and contemporary art at the MFAH, made the observation that the artist skillfully incorporates a variety of elements into his lush and alluring interiors and landscapes, including conflict, beauty, hope, and longing.