Raqib Shaw

Raqib Shaw was born in 1974 in Calcutta, India, and was raised in Kashmir in a family of merchants, an upbringing he has described as marked by political upheaval in the region. He moved to London in 1998 and studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, earning a BA with honours in Fine Art from 1998 to 2001 and an MA in Fine Art from 2001 to 2002. He has lived and worked in a studio in Peckham, south London, since establishing his practice there.

Shaw's paintings are built up in dense, intricately worked layers, often on a monumental, multi-panel scale, and museums have repeatedly framed his work as being in dialogue with Old Master painting and the Mughal miniature tradition of his upbringing. His institutional trajectory has been steady: solo exhibitions at Tate Britain and the Museum of Contemporary Art Miami in 2006, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2008, Manchester Art Gallery and Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague in 2013, the Whitworth in Manchester in 2017, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2018, and Ca' Pesaro in Venice in 2022. In 2023 Pace Gallery presented his New York solo show Space Between Dreams, and later that year the Frist Art Museum in Nashville opened Ballads of East and West, his first traveling museum retrospective, which continued to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Huntington in San Marino, California, through early 2025. In 2025 the Art Institute of Chicago opened Paradise Lost, built around a roughly one-hundred-foot, twenty-one-panel painting Shaw developed from 2009 to 2025, which the museum described as his most ambitious and personal project to date. He is reported to be opening a solo exhibition at Compton Verney in Warwickshire in September 2026. He is currently represented by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac; Pace Gallery hosted a solo exhibition of his work in New York in 2023 but is not confirmed as a current representative.

Museum framing of Shaw has been consistent over two decades: curators repeatedly describe his work as epic in scale and intricate in execution, and connect its density and ornamentation to his childhood in Kashmir and to a self-conscious dialogue with Old Master and Mughal miniature painting traditions. The Art Institute of Chicago's presentation of Paradise Lost, a painting worked on for roughly sixteen years, was described by the museum as his most ambitious and personal project, while the Frist Art Museum and its partner venues framed Ballads of East and West as an overdue first American survey of an artist already given solo exhibitions by Tate Britain, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other major institutions. No verbatim, attributable review from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed from the sources reviewed, so this section relies on institutional and curatorial characterizations rather than direct quotation.

Raqib Shaw's market is defined more by museum activity than by a deep or well-documented auction record. Multiple market-data sources point to a reported auction high of GBP 2.4 million for The Garden of Earthly Delights III, sold at Sotheby's London in 2007, but the exact sale date, and whether this figure reflects a hammer price or a price including premium, could not be independently reconfirmed against a primary auction-house lot record in the course of this research, and it should be treated as provisional pending further verification. Beyond that reported peak, there is no reliably documented pattern of repeat sales or price trend for his work in the sources available here. His institutional footprint, including holdings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Britain, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland Art Gallery, and the Amorepacific Museum of Art, is a stronger and better-documented signal of his standing than any single auction result.

Shaw's exact birth date and the full detail behind his reported 2007 auction record, including the precise sale date, are not confirmed in the public and institutional sources reviewed for this profile, and should be treated with appropriate caution until independently verified. There is no catalogue raisonne, and secondary-market authentication questions are generally directed to his representing gallery, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac; Pace Gallery hosted a 2023 solo exhibition but is not confirmed as current representation. Given the very limited public auction history, collectors should weigh Shaw's strong and growing museum presence, including a national US retrospective and a major Art Institute of Chicago exhibition, more heavily than any single reported sale price.