Raqib Shaw

Calcuta, India, 1974

            Raqib Shaw was born in 1974 in Calcutta, India. During his childhood, he moved with his family to London, where he studied art at Central Saint Martins. Influenced by great masters of renaissance painting, such as Carvaggio, Brunelleschi and mainly Bosch, Raqib set out to create a world of his own where art has the power to create values and to intervene in the viewer's personal story. At the same time, there is a tangible influence of Japanese art, not only in the choice of figures such as the cherry tree, but also in the use of plain colors.

            Many of his works are autobiographical or self-referential; he stars them as a character who functions as his alter ego and who participates in the most opulent and decadent parties imaginable. His works are robust, complex and full of details that encapsulate a world much larger than the frame that contains them. His technique–worked with stone, enamel and watercolor–composes scenes with a density of elements that are well balanced by the number of actions carried out by his characters: vandalism, sex, anthropophagy, lust, combat and mercy.

            Raqib blends these Eastern and Western influences in his work and in his life. His own home and studio, now located in a cozy London neighborhood, is a former sausage factory where the first floor serves as his bonsai home-sanctuary. Next to each work in progress, you can find hundreds of clippings and references to classical art, as if the work were the altar and the references a homage. With this kind of symbolic game, the artist sets the foundations on which he builds a cosmovision full of existentialist winks, sins and excesses.