Raqib Shaw - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Tuesday, October 9, 2012 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Thomas Gibson Fine Art, London
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Exhibited

    London, Thomas Gibson Fine Art, Raqib Shaw & Rina Banerjee, 7–28 October 2009

  • Literature

    Exhibition Catalogue, Raqib Shaw & Rina Banerjee, Thomas Gibson Fine Art, London, 2009, p. 7

  • Catalogue Essay

    “I have always been obsessed with the idea of making industrial paints and decorative materials into something beyond decorative. I want the paintings to question people’s notions of aesthetics.” RAQUIB SHAW

    “You have to live art. Art is not a product; it is not something that you make. It is a consequence of your way of painting your life.” RAQUIB SHAW

    “I have always been obsessed with the idea of making industrial paints and decorative materials into something beyond decorative. I want the paintings to question people’s notions of aesthetics.” (Raqib Shaw, quoted in The Garden of Earthly Delights, exh. cat., Victoria Miro Gallery, London, 2003)

    Death, Beauty and Justice is a work from 2007 by London-based artist Raqib Shaw. Even though this work depicts a battle scene, it is cast in a hallucinogenic scarlet suffused of flowers and feathers. A peacock-like beast has just stabbed a human-panther hybrid by using his elongated tongues to swing two swords. The painting contains Shaw’s trademark mythological animal-human creatures, not dissimilar to that which can be found in religion, fairy tales and Manga cartoons. Death, Beauty and Justice, in its exuberant and highly worked surface, recalls the delirious Baroque paintings of Peter Paul Rubens. Contrary to Ruben’s epic St.George and the Dragon, Shaw’s piece inverts the myth, by letting the ferocious beast stab the humanlike.

    Shaw’s artistic style is a highly ornate and decorative one, yet he uses this abundance of ornamental splendour while juxtaposing it with extreme violence. The ornamental extravaganza camouflages the atrocities committed by the creatures to each other.

    Raqib Shaw donated the fifth painting of the series, Death, Beauty and Justice V, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2010.

    “Looking at this work of Raqib Shaw, one understands the tremendous force of paradox: here, the dragon does justice and the animal-human hybrid strays. The eye is then seduced by a monstrous beauty and attracted by this splendid violence. Between Heaven and Earth, Raqib Shaw’s work does not reveal Hell but offers a magical world that shrinks, as it rises.” (Prof. Dr. Monia Abdallah, expert in contemporary art of the MiddleEast)

29

Death, Beauty & Justice

2007
acrylic, glitter, enamel and rhinestones on canvas laid on aluminium
diameter: 74 cm (29 1/8 in)
Signed, titled and dated ‘“Death, Beauty & Justice” Raqib Shaw 2007’ on the
reverse.

Estimate
£150,000 - 250,000 

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

10 October 2012
London