RAQIB SHAW
Palazzo della Memoria

Curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal

22 April – 25 September 2022

Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art
Dom Pérignon rooms

Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art presents, for the MUVE Contemporaneo programme presents Raqib Shaw: Palazzo della Memoria, in an exhibition curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal.

The selection, featuring twelve works produced over the past two years, is part of a site specific project conceived for Ca’ Pesaro’s galleries which draws influence from Italian and Venetian pictorial traditions and with inspirations from Tintoretto, Giorgione, Pannini and others, to reflect on the loss of homeland and the state of exile.

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.

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. Italian Renaissance painting provides the framework for their narratives, in particular the Venetian paintings of Tintoretto, including St Mary of Egypt (1582–87), from the Scuola Grande di San Rocco and Presentation of the Virgin (1551–56), from the church of Madonna dell’Orto and Giorgione’s iconic La Tempesta (1506–08), from the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

In collaboration with White Cube