Raqib Shaw
Phileas and I Under the Full Moon – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
2016
Edition of 150
Organic wool blanket 
142 x 192 cm | 55 7/8 x 75 9/16 in.
Packaged in an archival box
Each edition is numbered 
Published by White Cube and Glyndebourne, 2016

This limited edition organic wool blanket was created in collaboration with Glyndebourne, to coincide with Raqib Shaw's exhibition for White Cube at Glyndebourne in the summer of 2016.

Shaw is known for his highly detailed, opulent paintings that conjure fantastical worlds populated by strange creatures. For the Glyndebourne Shaw created three paintings which took their inspiration from a variety of sources, including the architecture and landscape of the opera venue, as well as William Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. This edition is taken from a painting based on the latter.
Taking Bottom as his alter-ego, Shaw depicts himself with ass’s head, robed in an exquisitely patterned kimono, reclining with a pipe in one hand and a flute of champagne raised up high in tribute to the moon in the other. As Andrea Schlieker writes in the publication accompanying the opera season, this is ‘a bacchanalian world of fantasy and carnival, ensnaring us into the artist’s very much darker dream.’ Shaw likens this to being an artist, who is ‘always chasing something that doesn’t exist’.

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