A gallery of visual delight

It was a bit like setting the cat among the pigeons. The pundits of the art world woke up with a start: Who was this guy? Raqib Shaw’s Garden of Earthly Delights 111 had sold for a belief-shattering $5.49 million at Sotheby’s on October 12 in London.

Now, this was serious: no Husain, SH Raza, Tyeb Mehta, Souza — or any of our much-feted greats — had gone anywhere near these Olympian heights. So, off the arterati went to the Internet to find out about this London-based ingénue who had obviously flown below their radar.

The better-informed headed for the home of a Mumbai collector who owned works by the Kolkata-born painter. Apparently Pundole Gallery was offered the Garden of Earthly Delights 111 last year, but the asking price of £90,000 was too much. 

It is difficult to imagine how a painter as young as Shaw (born in 1974) could have created such wonderfully idiosyncratic and monumental work. I was lucky enough to have seen this very painting in the Museum of Modern Art in New York a couple of years ago, as well as other works at the Tate Britain in London. 

What struck me was the way Shaw draws upon both Eastern and Western cultures, and much else, to create his own painterly universe: these are not borrowings or crude fusions, but part of his eclectic vision of our times that is aesthetically surreal, erotic and wacky.

Shaw is more than a sum of his parts. Among his statements: “My parents are Muslim, my teachers were Hindu scholars and I went to a Christian school and historically Kashmir was Buddhist.” You can’t and shouldn’t slot him.

From a distance some canvases with their intricate details and exquisite patterns recall Persian carpets or miniatures, even Jamavar shawls. But go up close and you have his take on sexual fantasies — not without violence — and hedonism.

This millennium garden of earthly delights has been built with car enamels, bling, industrial paints and gold stained glass paint. I don’t remember seeing any snakes, but there were hybrid creatures doing naughty things, especially lobsters that bring to mind
Salvador Dali’s frisky crustaceans. 

Shaw grew up in Kashmir, in a family that made carpets. Motifs and patterns of these carpets and Jamavar shawls must have formed the building blocks of his pictorial vocabulary, to which he added what he found in Chinese, Japanese and Western aesthetics — and the world of the street everywhere.

I don’t think there are any Raqib Shaws on the Indian landscape, but something exciting is certainly beginning to happen here. The traffic from tribal, traditional or folk art to modern or contemporary has largely been one-way. Contemporary artists have appropriated motifs from ‘folk’ art.

However, increasingly, the ‘craftspeople’ have been crossing the divide with a measure of success. Some years ago Jyotindra Jain curated Other Masters, which demonstrated how contemporary the themes and concerns of the traditional artists were.

There are more artists jumping over the divide. In Raj Kumar’s show at Sakshi Gallery in Mumbai, the Bastar-based artist has used the language of the folk idiom of where he lives, but described contemporary life around him with earthy wit and humour.

Jaipur-based Gopal Swami Khetanchi normally paints Rajasthani village belles. His new work appropriates works of European Masters and gives their personas Indian avatars. So, you have a Botticelli’s Birth of Venus with a Rajasthani woman draped only in pearls coming out of a lotus instead of a shell. Art critic Prayag Shukla writes  that the figures “have been given two contexts: Western and Eastern. These are not just copies…but recreations of sorts.”

It takes some chutzpah to do this — to “bring the Western masters into your own homes”, as Shukla tells me. For the new global artist everything is kosher. The world, old and new, is a grab-bag.

Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com