Sean Kelly is delighted to announce a solo presentation of eleven new paintings by British artist Idris Khan, featuring one large-scale painting and ten more intimately scaled works. Drawing on diverse cultural sources including literature, art, music and religion, Khan has developed a unique narrative involving densely layered imagery that inhabits the space between abstraction and figuration and speaks to themes of history, cumulative experience and the metaphysical collapse of time into single moments. Khan repeatedly stamps texts specific to each work onto heavily gessoed aluminium panels, ultimately eradicating the meaning of the original text to construct an abstract and universal visual language. Through this minimal presentation of repetitive gestures, the blocks of text stamped onto the surface in oil shift across each painting, creating a rhythm from one work to the next. The density and precision of Khan's compositions, defined by his technique of imposing multiple layers of text upon one another, allude to the excessive proliferation of information in the technical age whilst simultaneously advocating for a slower, more considered way of looking. Retaining traces of what has gone before or what has been left behind, Khan's works speak to a layering of experience that harbours palimpsests of the past whilst suggesting entirely new possibilities. In these new works, colour becomes a major protagonist, mapping an emotional context onto images that compress into a single frame, layering passages of experience and time.