Enter the Multiverse of Raqib Shaw

Walking through the Huntington Art Gallery, you encounter rooms filled with masterpieces of Western art. But when you turn a corner, you suddenly enter the imaginative realm created by the paintings of Raqib Shaw (b. 1974). In the exhibition “Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West,” Shaw’s paintings open windows that seem both familiar and fantastical. Freely borrowing from diverse artistic traditions—including Renaissance painting, Japanese prints, Indian miniatures, and Persian textiles—Shaw remixes the art historical canon, crafting alternative realities rooted in personal memories and surreal dreamscapes. Characters and motifs reappear across multiple paintings, creating the impression of an interconnected cosmos. Like the parallel universes popularized by today’s media franchises, Shaw has constructed his own vivid multiverse, inviting viewers to explore its colorful facets in depth.

Death and destruction shadow the fragile landscapes of Shaw’s worlds. Raised in the Kashmir Valley, Shaw remembers it as an earthly paradise cradled by the Himalayas before the region was engulfed in sectarian violence. His family fled to New Delhi in 1992 when Shaw was a teenager. In La Tempesta (After Giorgione), the artist seats himself in a scene of temporary refuge; behind him, a city burns, people flee, and lightning pierces dark clouds. Draped in a Kashmiri shawl and cradling his beloved dog, Shaw blows a delicate glass bubble. Within this orb appears his sun-drenched memory of the Kashmir Valley’s green hills, clear waters, and pink blossoms in springtime. Outside the bubble, wildflowers and waterlilies continue to bloom and thrive—but is this a vision of resilience or one on the brink of destruction? A spectral merwoman rises from the pond in the foreground. Is the water spirit tormented? Or is she poised to drag Shaw into the watery depths? As with most of Shaw’s work, La Tempesta suggests a narrative without resolution, leaving interpretation in the hands of the viewer.

Each of Shaw’s painted worlds seems like an alternate reality in which the artist himself takes the form of an avatar. In Ode to the Country without a Post Office, he appears wearing a Japanese kimono and conjures a stream of fireflies from a portal in the carpeted floor of a Mughal-inspired palace. The magical foreground contrasts sharply with the Kashmiri cityscape of Srinagar burning in the background. Echoing Mughal miniature paintings, Shaw’s works burst with brilliant colors and arrange narrative figures in architectural settings that open outward into wider landscapes. In Ode to the Country without a Post Office, the open arches demarcate the permeable boundary between a temporary refuge and a site of devastation.

The painting shares its title with a poem by the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001). Ali’s poem refers to Kashmir’s violent rebellion against Indian rule in the 1990s, a time when mail delivery halted for seven months. The poem is filled with haunting images of longing and desire as the author grapples with the turmoil in his homeland and his heart. Shaw takes inspiration from Ali’s poetic lament, which maps “longings with no limit”:

I light lamps, send my answers, Calls to Prayer
to deaf worlds across continents. And my lament
is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
to this world whose end was near, always near.
My words go out in huge packages of rain,
go there, to addresses, across the oceans.

Shaw’s paintings are haunted not only by personal memories but also by echoes of his earlier works. His multiverse functions like a hall of mirrors, with new paintings reflecting older paintings within themselves. In the monumental work The Retrospective, a hall is filled with miniature replicas of Shaw’s past creations. The painting’s vibrant colors, immense scale, and meticulous detail pull viewers into its world. As your eyes wander through this painted gallery, you encounter surreal landscapes, religious reinterpretations, and human-animal hybrids. Shaw provides a feast of visual Easter eggs for you to discover, such as the hyena-headed angel and bat-faced bishop in The Annunciation, displayed alongside The Retrospective in The Huntington’s exhibition.

At the center of The Retrospective, Shaw’s masked and kimono-clad avatar stands atop a stack of crates, accompanied by his dog, Mr. C. Wielding a toilet plunger like a conductor’s baton, Shaw orchestrates the fantastical scene around him. But is his masked avatar fully in control? Monkeys cavort on the lintels, parrots fly through the gallery, lizards clamber over arches, and decomposing skeletons crouch above doorways. The gallery’s meticulous order is counterbalanced by a carnivalesque energy that teeters between exuberance and extravagance, grotesqueness and decadence. The playful atmosphere, however, lightens the macabre overtones. The little skeletons, though suggestive of mortality, recall skeletons in Himalayan Buddhist art, which encourage the devout to confront death without fear. Shaw’s impish skeletons also echo the humorous spirits in Japanese prints—or the minions to be dispatched in video games.

Shaw’s paintings are delicate creations that explore the interplay between hope and despair, resilience and destruction, humor and profundity. His works take viewers on a dazzling journey through historical landscapes, personal memories, and global art traditions. The Retrospective reminds us that all worlds—whether painted or carried in the heart—are constructed and require effort to sustain. It serves as both a summation of Shaw’s artistic vision and a portal into his richly imagined multiverse.

The exhibition “Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West,” surveys two decades of Shaw’s career and unfolds in two locations in the Huntington Art Gallery. Seven paintings are on view in the North Passage, and two new tapestries have been installed in the upper register of the grand staircase. Shaw transformed The Perseverant Prophet and The Pragmatic Pessimist, two works from his Space Between Dream series, into the tapestries, which is a new medium for the artist.

To learn more about Raqib Shaw, you can purchase a monograph on his work in the Huntington Store or online. You can also watch the Tate museum’s video about Shaw and his artistic process, “Taking Craft to a Crazy, Romantic Extreme.”

“Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West” is a nationally touring exhibition organized by the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, with guest curator Zehra Jumabhoy. It was first presented at the Frist Museum from Sept. 15 through Dec. 31, 2023, followed by presentations at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum from Feb. 15 through May 12, 2024, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, from June 9 through Sept. 2, 2024. The exhibition opened at The Huntington on Nov. 16, 2024, and will remain on view through March 3, 2025.

Generous support for this exhibition is provided by Dorian Huntington Davis. Additional support is provided by the Cassat Art Endowment, the Douglas and Eunice Erb Goodan Endowment, the Pasadena Art Alliance, and the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation.

Nayan Shah is a professor of American studies & ethnicity and history at USC and the 2024–25 Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington.