Raqib Shaw. Space Between Dreams

About

On view from November 10 to December 22, the show, titled Space Between Dreams, will bring together 16 meticulously wrought works that merge imagined and real landscapes, combining imagery drawn from the artist’s memories of his native Kashmir; cityscapes evocative of London, New York, and Venice; and scenes from his garden in South London, where he lives and works. This will be Pace’s first presentation of Shaw’s work in New York since 2019.

Over the past two decades, Shaw has developed a singular method for creating opulent and richly detailed images depicting scenes that merge fantastical worlds with narratives from his own life. Reflecting on his own experiences, observations, and memories, Shaw’s dreamscapes are at once imagined environments and self-portraits, which meditate on afterimages from Kashmir—a place torn apart by political and ethnic violence—where he spent the early years of his life before emigrating to London at the age of 18. The title of the exhibition is an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe’s 1849 poem “A Dream Within a Dream,” which the artist first read as a child while growing up in India.