The Painter: Raqib Shaw Embraces the Night

Walking into painter Raqib Shaw’s home and studio in Peckham, South London, it’s almost impossible to focus on a single object. Statues of mythological creatures, towering shelves of books and intricately embroidered upholstery fill the space. It’s an ornate setting, one not unlike those in his works, whose opulence has shaped his reputation over the last two decades.

In the living area hangs a large Jacquard tapestry depicting a wintry palace in an imaginary landscape of icy blues. Inside, a man keeps a fire alive by burning art books, the names of Giotto and Tintoretto visible on the covers.

Raqib Shaw, The Pragmatic Pessimist, 2024, tapestry. Photo: White Cube (Ollie Hammick)

The work, which Shaw titled The Pragmatic Pessimist (2024), reflects on the destruction of the planet, with the artist as witness. It will be shown at Compton Verney in Warwickshire as part of Night Sonnets, Shaw’s first UK solo exhibition since 2015. “It’s a coming home,” he says as The Art Journal sits with him in his garden, a backyard-sized Eden where the sound of a waterfall almost makes you forget the city outside.

The new paintings build on Paradise Lost, Shaw’s 30m-wide autobiographical painting currently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. Across 21 panels, Shaw reflects on identity, the passing of time and the pursuit of beauty in the face of turmoil, weaving in references to both Western and Kashmiri thinkers. The result is a work that extends Shaw’s personal story into a broader meditation on how we make sense of a fractured world.

A Life Informed by Beauty

Born in Calcutta and raised in Kashmir, Shaw’s early years were shaped by Kashmiriyat, a philosophy unique to the Kashmir Valley, and which blends Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. “It was a very mystical place, where it almost felt as if all the important things happened at night,” Shaw recalls. “It posed the question: does the sun illuminate or does the sun hide? When you look at the sky, the sun does obliterate all the details. These are only revealed when the sun is not there.”

Shaw moved to the Indian city of New Delhi in 1989 following the Kashmir uprising and joined his family’s business. A work trip to London and visit to the National Gallery in 1993 changed the course of his life. “I saw a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger," he says. "I thought: ‘I’m going to become a painter.’”

Five years later, he enrolled at Central Saint Martins and began developing his signature style. “At the time, painting was terribly out of fashion compared to performance and video, so I wanted to find my own medium,” he says. Using enamel paints applied with porcupine quills, first gifted to him by a friend visiting Botswana, and a liquid gold water-based liner used to repair stained glass, Shaw developed something akin to contemporary capriccio: creating otherworldly scenes drawing on classical art, opera and literature.

New Works

In Night Sonnets, night becomes more than a time of day. "Night is a threshold between the real and the imaginary,” Shaw says. “A kind of dialogue between the physical and the psychological.” Painting the series as the rest of London slept, he drew on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Charlotte Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the verses of sixteenth-century Kashmiri poet Habba Khatoon and historical figures including Ludwig II of Bavaria, known as the ‘Moon King’ for his extravagant, moonlit castles and romantic devotion to the night.

Raqib Shaw, The Dream, 2018-2022, acrylic liner and enamel on aluminium. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

Visitors enter the low-lit exhibition space to come face to face with The Dream (2018), the largest painting in the series. Shaw drew on the American mythologist and writer Joseph Campbell’s idea of bliss as living a purposeful life, as well as the essays of the French philosopher Henry Corbin. “[Corbin] wrote about the concept of mundus imaginalis, this world of imagination, and when I look at my life, it really is,” he says.

The Hermit (2026), a continuation of one of the panels in Paradise Lost, depicts an idealised landscape recalling the Karakoram mountain range, where Shaw camped as a child. A crackling fire outside the character’s hut is the painting’s only source of light. “Here, the silence of night allows the background to become amplified,” he says. The hermit depicted in the scene is not a misanthropist escaping reality, but he reflects a growing desire that many of us possess for moments of pause amid our chaotic urban lives. “I see myself as a scribe," Shaw says. "That’s what artists do. We document a moment in our collective thinking.”

The figure reappears in The Galvanised Scribe (2026). The natural world has given way to a golden Mughal archway framing a city burning in the distance. At a golden desk, the scribe records the unfolding tragedy. Details emerge across the frame, from the shikara taxi boat at his feet to shadowy faces billowing from the smoke. It points to what Shaw wants from his viewers: time. “The more time you spend in front of the paintings, the more they reveal," he says. "So you have no choice but to give them that time.”