Museum Exhibition

Raqib Shaw at Compton Verney

Posted: 14 July 2026

Raqib Shaw, *The Pragmatic Pessimist*, 2024

Venue Visit Artist Page

19 September 2026 – 21 February 2027

Warwickshire, UK

‘Night Sonnets’ opens this September at Compton Verney, marking Raqib Shaw’s first major UK exhibition in over a decade. Bringing together paintings and tapestry, the exhibition examines how memory, exile, autobiography and history are internalised in visual form.

Beginning with the earliest and largest work, The Dream (2018), ‘Night Sonnets’ presents new paintings made for Compton Verney. Spanning eight years, the works trace a psychological investigation that moves from the expansive, proliferating pictorial field of The Dream towards images that are quieter, more concentrated and increasingly inward.

For Shaw, the silence of night concentrates attention, allowing the works to pursue a sustained, exacting psychological enquiry. These paintings function as conversations with the self; arches, lattices, windows, reflections and water depicted in the works operate as thresholds in the psyche. These open onto Henry Corbin’s concept of mundus imaginalis, an intermediate realm between sense and intellect, where imaginal forms acquire visibility and memory, history and prophecy become material for examination.