- This breathtakingly intricate, beautiful book accompanies an exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and extensive publicity surrounding it. The exhibition runs 19 May to 28 October and there will be a BBC tv program exploring the work of Raqib Shaw this spring Raqib Shaw is one of the most extraordinary and sought-after artists working in the world today. Born in Calcutta in 1974 and raised in Kashmir, he came to London to study in 1998 and has lived there ever since. Inspired by a broad range of influences, including the old masters, Indian miniatures, Persian carpets and the Pre-Raphaelites, his paintings are infused with memories and longing for his homeland in Kashmir. His technique constitutes a completely unique kind of enamel painting. Spending months on preparatory drawings, tracings and photographic studies, he then transfers the composition onto prepared wooden panels, establishing an intricate design with acrylic liner, which leaves a slightly raised line. He adds the enamel paint using needle-fine syringes and a porcupine quill, with which he maneuvers the paint. The finished works are intricate, magical and breathtaking in their color and complexity. This book accompanies an exhibition of eight paintings by Raqib Shaw at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, alongside two paintings which have long obsessed him and have influenced specific works: Sir Joseph Noel Paton's The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, 1849 (National Gallery of Scotland) and Lucas Cranach's An Allegory of Melancholy, 1528 (private collection). The book includes the first full-length biographical study of the artist.

The first monograph on more than thirty years’ work by the Indian-born British artist, whose opulent, brightly colored paintings have made him one of the most extraordinary and sought-after artists working today. Shaw’s work is as vibrant and ornate in color and detail as it is ambitious in scope, with a remarkable synergy between his fantastical and often violent imagery and the delicacy of his technique. Deeply inspired by the old masters but infused with his own personal iconography, and drawing equally on eastern and western mythology, his work represents a compelling and profoundly contemporary hybridization of aesthetics and sensibilities. His opulent and intricately detailed paintings of fantastical worlds, often with surfaces inlaid with vibrantly colored jewels and painted in enamel, reveal an eclectic fusion of influences—from Persian carpets and Northern Renaissance painting to industrial materials and Japanese lacquerware—but ultimately reflect the universality of the human condition. Collected here, in the first comprehensive monograph on the artist to date, are more than 100 of Shaw’s works, representing thirty years of painting in which intricate detail, rich color, and bejeweled surfaces mask the intensity and depth of his imagery.

Raqib Shaw?s opulent and brightly coloured paintings suggest a fantastical world full of intricate detail, rich colour, and jewel-like surfaces, all masking the intense violent, religious and sexual nature of its imagery. There is a sense of anxiety in the paintings, which are influenced by Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. In this exhibition he also made a large-scale model of a giant lobster-type creature devouring a man with a bird-head.

Is it possible to speak of a contemporary art with an Islamic difference? This question is the subject of an exhibition that brings together artists who come from the Islamic world. Tapping into certain aesthetic, political, and spiritual notions, this book seeks to highlight the nuanced reactions of each individual artist.

Accordion-fold book

Joan Eardley's career lasted barely fifteen years: she died in 1963, aged just forty-two. During that time she concentrated on two very different themes: the extraordinarily candid paintings of children in the Townhead area of Glasgow; and paintings of the fishing village of Catterline, just south of Aberdeen, with its leaden skies and wild sea. These two contrasting strands are the focus of this book, which looks in detail at her working process

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Explore LGBTQ+ history with Queer Art, an intoxicating and energetic curation of iconic artworks that express queerness in all its forms, from the twentieth century to today.