Museum of Fine Arts, Houston - October 24, 2021–January 17, 2022
Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West
In 2024, I co-organized the MFAH installation of Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West with Alison de Lima Greene. Organized by the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, it will be on view at the MFAH from June 9 through September 2, 2024. The exhibition surveys over a decade of Shaw’s mature career, from 2009 to 2023, ranging from intimate paintings to monumental compositions that took up to seven years to complete. The exhibition at Houston includes two new paintings and two new tapestries as well.
Installation Images
Interpretive Materials
Shaw’s Sources
In 2014 Raqib Shaw had an artistic breakthrough when he began mixing his own paint with a machine, resulting in enameled colors of glossy intensity that he manipulates with porcupine quills. This practice inspired Shaw to engage with Renaissance paintings he saw at the National Gallery when he first moved to London. Shaw subverts geographical boundaries as Japanese aesthetics and Indo-Persian architecture converge with citations from Renaissance masters with the Valley of Kashmir residing just beyond the window frames. This video explores the many influences in Shaw’s work and how they unite in his paintings.
In the months leading up to the exhibition, I researched all the art historical and architectural influences in Raqib’s paintings, even discovering references that were previously undiscovered. I worked with our interpretive specialists to create this video where I directed which element in Shaw’s paintings should guide the transition.