Detail of a panel from Raqib Shaw's monumental painting Paradise Lost

Art Institute of ChicagoGrant Park / Loop

Raqib Shaw: Paradise Lost

Now showing7 June 2025 – 3 January 2028$32

A 21-panel painting over 100 feet wide carries viewers from the nocturnal solitude of the artist's Kashmiri childhood through the frenzy of the Western art world to a fragile, renewed dawn.

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On now All of November 2026

At the far left, a lone figure with a tiger's head howls at the moon above the Karakoram mountains. That is Shaw as a boy in Kashmir, he writes, and he keeps coming back over the next 100 feet: as a chained monkey watching buildings collapse, and near the end in a nomad's hut by a fire with his dog, Mr. C.

It is one painting in 21 panels, shown complete for the first time in Galleries 141–142. Shaw draws gold outlines, fills them with car enamel from syringes, works it with a porcupine quill and sets in crystals. You step back for the raging seas and falling palaces, then lean in to find a baboon in a cherry tree strangling a fawn.

The Sun-Times' Neil Steinberg chose not to print photos; the curator says no photograph captures the detail. Critic Chris Miller found it "revolting and fascinating at the same time". It comes with museum admission, Thursdays run to 8pm, and it closes on 15 November.

Look for

The howl at the moon
Start at the far left, where a lone animal-headed figure howls at the moon from a cliff above the Karakoram mountains, Shaw's picture of himself as a boy.
The bird leaving its gilded cage
In the next panel a stylised figure opens a gilded cage and lets the bird go, the moment Shaw marks as breaking away.
The jewelled serpents and the crystal mantis
In the third panel a bound figure is circled by snakes glittering with jewels and enamel, one double-headed, with a crystal-encrusted praying mantis perched on daffodils.
Shaw under the cherry tree
Near the centre Shaw sits fully human beneath a cherry blossom tree with his dog in his lap, while his own face cries out from the crests of the waves.
The nomad's hut
Toward the end, in a forest clearing, Shaw sits by a small fire in a crude hut with his dog Mr. C, deer and antelope around him and the vessels empty.