Idris Khan

Born in Birmingham in 1978, Idris Khan completed his Master’s Degree at the Royal College of Art and lives and works in London.

He was appointed OBE for services to Art in the Queen’s Birthday 2017 Honours List. Khan’s first career survey exhibition in the United States, Idris Khan: “Repeat After Me”, was held at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, USA, in 2024.

Drawing inspiration from the history of art and music as well as key philosophical and theological texts, Idris Khan investigates memory, creativity and the layering of experience. Khan’s works – in media including sculpture, painting and photography – rely on a continuous process of creation and erasure, or the adding of new layers while retaining traces of what has gone before. He is celebrated for works in which techniques of layering are used to arrive at what might be considered the essence of an image, whereby something entirely new is created through repetition and superimposition.

While earlier works drew on pre-existing cultural artefacts and were about creating a totality from discrete parts, more recent series introduce another layer of mediation and are resolutely hand-made. Often taking many weeks to create, the results consist of many strands of text drawn from the artist’s own writings in response to classic art historical, philosophical and religious tracts. These texts have profound resonance for the artist and describe his approach to creating work. However, for the viewer their full meaning is elusive. Khan suggests that our linear experience of time and place has a more shadowy relationship with memory and the subconscious, one that cannot be so easily grasped.

It is in this contemplative space that both the processes of Minimalist art and allusions to the role of repetition in the world’s major religions are brought into focus as a vehicle for transcendence and a conduit of the sublime.