Shaw, who was raised in Kashmir and now lives and works in London, creates intensely worked, finely detailed paintings that depict parallel, visionary worlds suffused with deep personal and psychological meaning. Often monumental in scale, they combine hybrid influences: from Old Master painting to the tradition of the miniature, from the poetry of Ovid to the Persian and Indian Islamic culture to which he belongs, condensing time and space to traverse landscapes, seasons, myths and epochs.

In his new series of works, Shaw transfigures his own South London garden into a verdant backdrop for the now-lost world of Kashmir, and for the imaginary paradise of a childhood landscape tinged with the melancholy of exile.