Raqib Shaw:
night sonnets

About the
Exhibition

Embrace the night and immerse yourself in the dreamlike works of Raqib Shaw with our new exhibition.

Night Sonnets, Shaw’s first major UK show in more than a decade, brings together a cycle of nocturnal paintings and tapestry informed by the artist’s lifelong interest in moonlight and the conditions of the night.

Moonlight has long shaped how Shaw thinks, filtered through memories of the moonlit saffron fields of his boyhood home Kashmir, where “nights were dense with stories”, and diverse cultural references including his love of poetry and the verses of The Nightingale of Kashmir, Habba Khatoon, his affinity with the ‘Moon King’ Ludwig II of Bavaria and opera. He works by night, crafting his exquisitely detailed compositions in quiet solitude while the city surrounding his studio sleeps.

Shaw invites us to slow down, to look closely and to consider our own relationship with the night through new and never before seen works in which the interplay of light – moonlight, blazing firelight and reflected glow – and shadow reveals and conceals psychologically charged landscapes populated by figures, animals and imaginary creatures.