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Ca’ Pesaro in collaboration with White Cube presents 'Palazzo della Memoria', an exhibition of new paintings by Raqib Shaw, curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal. The selection, featuring twelve paintings produced over the past two years, draws on works by several of the great Venetian artists, to reflect on the loss of homeland and the state of exile.
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'Pallazo della Memoria' an excerpt of the film directed by Dominic Gilday
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‘Raqib Shaw’s paintings allow the viewer to travel between the wondrous natural beauties of Kashmir and the arguably more prosaic worlds of South London. There, however, the artist has constructed his own memory paradise that has views onto distant city palaces or cathedral-like towers. Executed with a meticulously detailed and uniquely calibrated sense of both drawing and colour, calculated to astonish, each painting demands time to discover evermore on further looking.’
– Norman Rosenthal, 2022
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Shaw, who was raised in Kashmir and now lives and works in London, creates intensely worked, finely detailed paintings that depict parallel, visionary worlds suffused with deep personal and psychological meaning. Often monumental in scale, they combine hybrid influences: from Old Master painting to the tradition of the miniature, from the poetry of Ovid to the Persian and Indian Islamic culture to which he belongs, condensing time and space to traverse landscapes, seasons, myths and epochs.
Studio Raqib Shaw, London
Photo: Dominic Gilday, 2022
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In his new series of works, Shaw transfigures his own South London garden into a verdant backdrop for the now-lost world of Kashmir, and for the imaginary paradise of a childhood landscape tinged with the melancholy of exile.
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Raqib ShawAgony in the Garden (after Tintoretto) II, 2020-2021Acrylic and enamel on aluminium129.1 x 109.1 cm | 50 13/16 x 42 15/16 in.
132.6 x 112.6 x 7.2 cm | 52 3/16 x 44 5/16 x 2 13/16 in. (framed) -
In Agony in the Garden II (2020–21), the artist is seen picking flowers next to a pool overrun with waterlilies, while a second figure, dressed in contemporary clothes but with the head of a hare, gathers blossom from a tree which is now bleeding, a red pool gathering on the grass beneath. Azaleas, rhododendrons, pines, willows, cherry blossom, rocks, streams and a carp pond create a secluded retreat, a natural canvas that serves as inspiration for the vivid, mythological world that Shaw conjures.
Agony in the Garden II, 2020-21
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‘The biblical subject of 'The Agony in the Garden' (an anguished, solitary Jesus prays to God at Gethsemane) is one that Tintoretto and many of his contemporaries chose or were asked by their 16th-century patrons to represent, and satisfies Shaw’s translational need for the representation of ultimate loneliness.’ - Norman Rosenthal, 2022
Tintoretto, The Prayer in the Garden, 1578–81. Courtesy Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice
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Raqib ShawExquisite Penance in Exile… (after Cranach), 2019-20Acrylic liner and enamel on birch wood73 x 53 cm | 28 3/4 x 20 7/8 in.
76.6 x 56.7 x 7 cm | 30 3/16 x 22 5/16 x 2 3/4 in. (framed) -
‛Shaw’s work often draws on some of Western art’s greatest paintings for inspiration, but also conjures the miniaturist, highly refined traditions of both Persian and Indian Islamic cultures, to which Shaw is so clearly heir, translating his sources into his own art, to show us a detailed, dream-like world, often on a monumental scale.’ - Norman Rosenthal, 2022
Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Penance of St John Chrysostom, 1509. Courtesy St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri
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Raqib ShawShrinking Lease of the Summer of 2020 (after Tintoretto), 2020-2022Acrylic liner and enamel on aluminium190.2 x 90 x 5 cm | 74 7/8 x 35 7/16 x 1 15/16 in.
193.4 x 93.4 x 7.6 cm | 76 1/8 x 36 3/4 x 3 in. (framed) -
Like much of the artist’s work, Shrinking Lease of the Summer of 2020 (2020–22), shows the artist as a lone protagonist within an imaginary, fantastical scene. Sitting with his beloved dog, Mr C, beside a cascading stream of water, amid profuse flora and flowering trees with the contemporary London skyline in the distance, the image is one of contemplation and tranquillity.
Shrinking Lease of the Summer of 2020 (after Tintoretto), 2020-2022
(detail)
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Raqib ShawFinal Autumn of the Lost Homecoming (after Tintoretto), 2020-2022Acrylic liner and enamel on aluminium190 x 90 x 5.5 cm | 74 13/16 x 35 7/16 x 2 3/16 in.
193.5 x 93.5 x 7.2 cm | 76 3/16 x 36 13/16 x 2 13/16 in. (framed) -
Final Autumn of the Lost Homecoming (after Tintoretto) (2020–22), is a similar mystical image composed of myriad allegorical ghoulish faces and figures amidst a grove of trees, in which the artist is seen draping his precious jamawar shawl into running water, its intricate design both metaphorically and visibly dissolving away into the surface ripples.
Final Autumn of the Lost Homecoming (after Tintoretto), 2020-2022
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‘The enclosed garden – the hortus conclusus –offers the only possibility of isolated survival, of the right space in which to conjure up work.’ - Norman Rosenthal, 2022
Summer Solitude I, 2021
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Raqib ShawThe Final Submission in Fire on Ice, 2021-2022Acrylic liner and enamel on aluminium97.4 x 110 x 5.4 cm | 38 3/8 x 43 5/16 x 2 1/8 in.
104 x 132 x 7 cm | 40 15/16 x 51 15/16 x 2 3/4 in. (framed) -
‘Shaw works like few other artists of his age to make manifest the ability of art/painting to stop time in a totally parallel universe rendered by personal imagination, one realised through the creation of an intensely detailed enamelled painting that it is almost impossible for the viewer to fully absorb, as it demands the eye wander over it while it is also attempting to take it the work as a whole.’ - Norman Rosenthal, 2022
The Final Submission in Fire on Ice, 2021-2022
detail
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When the Thing with Feathers Turned Red (after Tintoretto) (2021-2022) takes inspiration from Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers (c.1861)
‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
Raqib ShawWhen the Thing with Feathers Turned Red (after Tintoretto), 2021-22Acrylic liner and enamel on birch wood79 x 60 x 5.5 cm | 31 1/8 x 23 5/8 x 2 3/16 in.Find out more -
‘In Tintoretto’s The Adoration of the Shepherds (1578–81) (also in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, and a painting which in its own time represented a new and original idea of the sacred and humble stable, dividing the action into two distinct spaces: one for the Earthly herdsmen, and one above for the holy family), Shaw recognises a special opportunity. This precedent allowed him to depict in detail the ground floor of his studio-come-living space just as it was being consumed by a devastating fire in 2017 (an event that inevitably had a very personal traumatic and symbolic meaning for him).’ - Norman Rosenthal, 2022
Tintoretto, The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1578–81. Courtesy Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice
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'No painting defines Venice in a more sublime and perfect way than Giorgione’s The Tempest (c.1506–08). This unique image has over time become the veritable ‘Mona Lisa’ of the Grand Canal. Shaw’s interpretive painting of its legendary forebear, La Tempesta (2019–21), is also replete with ambiguous visual references, but ones inevitably made for another age and historical circumstance.' - Norman Rosenthal, 2022
Giorgione, The Tempest, 1506–08. Courtesy the Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice
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Raqib ShawLa Tempesta (after Giorgione), 2019-2021Acrylic liner and enamel on birch wood
137 x 109 cm | 53 15/16 x 42 15/16 in. -
'As the original does, this painting offers a false sense of idyll and calm but here the stormy setting is one far away from Venice, in the Kashmiri Himalayan mountains, a snowy region that Indian legend has it is the dwelling place of the gods.' - Norman Rosenthal, 2022
La Tempesta, (2019-2021)
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The Departure (2021–22) records Shaw musing on leaving Kashmir, taking Tintoretto’s Presentation of the Virgin (1551–56) for its scenic structure but relocating the narrative to the foothills of the Himalayas.
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Raqib ShawThe Departure (after Tintoretto), 2021-2022Acrylic liner and enamel on aluminium80 x 85 x 5.4 cm | 31 1/2 x 33 7/16 x 2 1/8 in.
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The notion of painting as an aide-mémoire reoccurs in the artist’s magnum opus, The Retrospective 2002–2022 (2015–22), which takes its form and startingpoint from Giovanni Paolo Pannini’s 1757 painting, Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome.
Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome, 1757. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts Boston
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Raqib ShawThe Retrospective 2002-2022, 2015-22Acrylic liner, enamel and rhinestones on aluminium214 x 270 cm | 84 1/4 x 106 5/16 in.
217.6 x 273.6 x 6.7 cm | 85 11/16 x 107 11/16 x 2 5/8 in. (framed) -
Any sense of landscape idyll is ultimately vanquished in Ode to the Country without a Post Office (2019–20), in which Shaw sits inside an elaborately tiled arcade, war and destruction lighting up the sky behind him a deep purple. Removed and in a sacrosanct place, the artist points with a stick into a square of light on the floor, on which several of the fireflies that form accents of light across the surface of the painting, have finally come to rest.
Raqib ShawOde to the Country without a Post Office, 2019-2020Acrylic liner and enamel on birch wood80 x 85 x 5.5 cm | 31 1/2 x 33 7/16 x 2 3/16 in.
83.5 x 88.5 x 7.2 cm | 32 7/8 x 34 13/16 x 2 13/16 in. (framed) -
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