Glittering, gorgeous and surprisingly erotic: that is Raqib Shaw: Garden of Earthly Delights at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami.Shaw is one of several artists featured in Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, which is at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, curated by Fereshteh Daftari. Most of the artists in the MOMA show were born in countries where Islam is a major religion. That show is part of several shows that The New York Times singled out as addressing the problematic nature of contemporary ”Islamic” art. That is, the artists create work that draws upon Islamic traditions. Yet, like Shaw’s mixed media works on board and paper at MOCA, their work is far more in synch with the questioning nature of international contemporary art than it is with the violent factions of militant Islam that have been protesting Danish cartoon images of Allah.
Born in 1974 in Calcutta, Shaw grew up in Kashmir when this mountainous region was caught in border disputes between India and Pakistan, a clash that dates back at least to 1947, when Indian and British leaders decided to partition the country into India and Pakistan. It was a decision they hoped would quell the violence between Hindus and Muslims but didn’t. Shaw was educated in London, where he is now based, in the late 1990s. His scintillating art weaves together a range of materials that catch the light and eye: gold paint, glitter and semi-precious stones arranged within luminous fields of industrial paint and car enamel. The MOCA show contains eight works from his series Garden of Earthly Delights. The title comes from a famous 15th century painting on three panels by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch is known for his fantastical scenes of demons, animals, food and people, painted with exquisite detail and with such a bizarre sensibility that in the 20th century surrealist artists claimed him as one of their own.
To Bosch’s still not-fully-understood example Shaw brings the detail of Persian and Indian miniature illustrations and Kashmiri textiles. His art seduces the eye with its vibrant underwater garden, a place of sensuality, genitalia and hybrid creatures, like the eel with a lion’s head, fangs and dragonfly wings in Garden of Earthly Delights VII. Shaw lures us into a magic world teeming with the bizarre and shockingly beautiful.
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