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About Garden of Earthly Delights X Against the rich blue of a deep underwater world, strange mythical sea creatures – half human, half animal – copulate and struggle together amongst glittering coral reefs and shimmering shoals of fish; small ferocious sea creatures chase winged penises ejaculating lines of silver; a black silhouetted human figure throws back his bird head in painful ecstasy as he is straddled by an oversize lobster. Garden of Earthly Delights X 2004 is the extraordinary centre piece of a series of work by Raqib Shaw which, unlike Hieronymous Bosch’s fifteenth century triptych of the same title, seems to celebrate pleasure and the indulgence of sexual fantasy without any recourse to moral codes or to a sense of reality. This labour-intensive painting captivates and overwhelms the eye with its vivid hues, intricate detail and jewel-like surface that initially mask the strong violence and sexuality of the imagery. Gold stained glass paint is used to outline each fictional character or detail and metallic industrial paints fill in the intense colour range. Shaw’s non-traditional techniques and hybrid style are hard to place within contemporary art and culture and yet the work feels uniquely fresh and urgent.
Some writing on Shaw’s work neatly positions it in terms of his Kashmiri upbringing as part of ‘a family of carpet makers’. Yet this is to reduce the work to a neo-colonial notion of ‘Otherness’, echoing Shaw’s impression of being treated upon arrival at a London art school in 1998 as a ‘noble savage’. As he points out: ‘My work has nothing to do with what Kashmir stands for because as a child I had so many influences. My parents are Muslim, my teachers were Hindu scholars, I went to a Christian school and historically Kashmir was Buddhist. And then I was living in India and it’s very secular...and I didn’t believe in organised religion. But there is a great tendency in the West to say that you come from here so you must be doing this and that.’ The work is not representative of or affiliated to any particular religious, geographical or ethnic influence, just as the artist’s life story is more complex and eventful than the summary often provided. Instead, Shaw’s work is a joyful conglomeration of styles and cultures colliding within a hedonistic mix.
However although a biographical reading may be too literal, the subject of each painting or work on paper can be seen as indicative of Shaw’s emotional state of mind at the time of production. The recent Reflections series of works on paper is painted in his signature painstaking method of outlining each motif in gold, then filling in the opulent colour; one mistake in the lengthy process and the whole thing has to be abandoned. The series depicts a collection of witty and provocative coded portraits of significant people in Shaw’s life and betrays its preoccupation in the title, offering an opportunity for the artist to contemplate the next direction for his work. This partly took the form of translating a recurring two-dimensional vignette, the repellent yet intriguing lobster/birdman found in Garden of Earthly Delights X, into a sculpture. The exquisitely carved humanoid figure, a mirror representation of Shaw’s own physique, is made repulsive by the addition of a stuffed turkey head. The predatory lobster, meticulously remodelled from an actual creature to look convincingly realistic, is embellished with precious stones, embedded in the skin to make a surface at once beautiful and grotesque. Like Shaw’s paintings, this work uses the veneer, or even the actual materials, of wealth and extravagance to question the values of an expensive lifestyle, as it remains unclear whether the figures are conjoined in sexual celebration or abuse.
New works on paper and a painting presented here for the first time have been inspired by Holbein, whose The Ambassadors at the National Gallery was the first Western painting Shaw saw upon his arrival in London at the age of 16. He describes how his encounter with this celebrated portrait consolidated his growing reservations about entering the family business: ‘I was very moved to see Holbein’s Ambassadors as the painting seemed to answer my doubts about the meaning of life dedicated to making money.’ Shaw is drawn to the morality tales of medieval and Renaissance art, just as he is excited by their antiquated techniques and artistic conventions in his drive to question what painting can be today. Though well informed about modernist art movements, their particular preoccupations – often more highly regarded in Western art history than elsewhere – are not relevant to him. It is significant that Holbein was an acclaimed designer of goldsmiths work, jewellery and tapestry, amongst other skills, in an age when there was little distinction between the decorative and fine arts. With equal attention to the fine detail that conveys affluence and status, Shaw has reverently copied Holbein’s iconic portraits of Henry VIII and wives Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves and playfully embellished them with dramatic explosions and animal features. What may seem to some like a desecration is regarded by Shaw as homage as he appropriates Holbein to make work that reveals a period of personal turmoil in its unexpected violence. By adding his own theatrical features to these images he emphasises how they have now come to symbolise these historic figures suggesting: ‘I am very interested in the inevitable decrepitude of body and mind that is the human condition and the portraits, like everything else, are mere pegs to hang other issues on. I am also aware that Henry and Holbein have been dead for centuries and so will we pass away, but the symbols remain’. The ‘other-worlds’ presented in Shaw’s imaginative works are almost completely informed by an extensive knowledge and fascination with culture, whether popular, classical, ancient or modern, rather than an attempt to represent everyday life or a notion of reality. The artist comments: ‘Since childhood there is a persistent confusion or even collision between stereotypes of reality and fantasy (whatever reality means) in my mind.’ The eclectic sources that influence Shaw range from Hindu religious iconography to early Renaissance painters; from eighteenth century traveller’s journals in the archives of the Natural History Museum to a particular genre of British adult comics. Shaw appears to ‘collect’ cultural styles in much the same way as the Victorians did – as demonstrated in his extensive private collection of nineteenth century porcelain – as a way to understand the world and his place within it. Beneath the mesmerising surfaces of Shaw’s work, carefully calculated to seduce, lies a more subversive set of interests that seek to question the very ideals of decadence and luxury that they at first appear to represent.
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Raqib Shaw Garden of Earthly Delights X 2005, Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Adam Sender and George Lindemann, Jr., 2005 |
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