Fittingly for an artist who loves opera, Raqib Shaw has been chosen to show in White Cube’s pop-up gallery at the Glyndebourne Festival this year. The London-based Kashmiri-born artist is creating three new paintings based on Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which both form part of the 2016 music programme.
Shaw, who first visited Glyndebourne in Lewes, East Sussex as a student in 1994 when he felt moved listening to Figaro sitting under a willow tree, says opera has been a continual influence on his opulent and phantasmagorical works. “My paintings are theatrical, revealing a combination of my childhood in Kashmir with my adult exile in London,” he says. “I combine Eastern and Western philosophical and aesthetic influences to create an imaginary world, populated by characters of my creation; hybrid-beasts and collaged landscapes.”
The artist says he would like to create a set design for an opera one day. “I think [my paintings] could work well for a dramatic opera or theatre set,” he says.
Shaw’s exhibition, which will be displayed in a temporary gallery designed by the London-based architects Carmody Groarke, is the second in the White Cube at Glyndebourne series. The German painter Georg Baselitz was the first last year.
Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of two operas at Glyndebourne based on Shakespeare plays being staged to mark the 400th anniversary of the writer's death. The second is a new production of Hector Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict, an adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing.
Other highlights include a new version of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, directed by Annabel Arden; Melly Still’s production of Janácek’s The Cunning Little Vixen; and Michael Grandage’s popular The Marriage of Figaro, which also returns to Glyndebourne. The festival runs from 21 May to 28 August.
