If you ever wanted to see a lobster having sex with a man with the head of a plucked bird, you won’t want to miss this exhibition. Head upstairs and you will find a hyperrealist sculpture, titled Adam, of exactly this partnering. Tiny frogs and bird-like monkeys are clambering out the open mouth of the male figure, and I wouldn’t dare tell you what other orifices contain.

It’s by far the most successful work in Raqib Shaw’s show — not just because it looks as if it comes from the props cupboard of Pan’s Labyrinth, but because of its clever art history and the precision of its symbolism. This is a kind of 3D re-creation of the hybrid creatures that inhabit the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch and Max Ernst, a surrealist work about the violence of sexual desire — but the artist also intended it as a contemporary allegory of human greed.

Born in Calcutta in 1974, Shaw moved to London in 1998 and studied at Saint Martins. He established a name for himself early in this decade with an intensely decorative style that brought to mind enlarged Indian miniatures. One of his large works was auctioned in 2007 for £2.7 million, and he exhibited at the Met in New York last year. Thanks to the rarity of his exhibitions here, few know that he has been one of the most hotly collected and expensive British artists of the past five years.

Shaw’s work has been part of a movement among artists — a Catholic Counter-Reformation against minimalism — behind which lay the question: “Why shouldn’t art be ornamental, decorative, figurative and beautiful?” But in the ground floor space of this exhibition, I found a few negative answers to this question. It is full of Raqib’s trademark opulent and intricate paintings, executed with a porcupine quill in shiny metallic paints. Some of them are enormous and are said to be worth £2 million.

There is no denying the skill. With a level of glittering detail that will amaze children, grannies and billionaires alike, Shaw fills his pictures with abundant flora and fauna, ruined temples and fantastical creatures. Birds with wolves’ heads and flying centaurs dart around fighting each other with spears as if at Armageddon. But there are too many swarms of butterflies and flocks of birds filling up the empty spaces in these pictures and the danger is that its subject becomes primarily the orgy of its own decorative indulgence.

Until 4 July. www.whitecube.com