One of the most beautiful artworks we have ever seen in person is Paradise Lost by Raqib Shaw. Unfortunately due to the crowd and the size of this painting, 100ft long, we were unable to capture the full piece in a single photo.

MUSEUM TEXT:

At the Art Institute of Chicago, Shaw debuts his more-than 100-feet-wide, 21-panel Paradise Lost (2009–25), the artist’s most ambitious and personal project to date. This magnificent allegorical painting takes viewers on a spellbinding journey, from the nocturnal solitude of the artist’s childhood in Kashmir to the frenzied daylight of the art world and the West to finally a fragile, renewed dawn. Each panel is dense with symbolism: mythical beasts, anthropomorphic hybrids, collapsing kingdoms, and natural beauty in various states of transformation. Throughout, the work is dotted with images of the artist, sometimes as a humanoid creature with different animal heads, at another time as a monkey looking with awe at the gleaming edifices and the wealth of the West, and sometimes unambiguously in full human form seated on a bed of saffron under a blossoming cherry tree, lost deep in his thoughts.