IDRIS KHAN

Victoria Miro is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by Idris Khan in the artist’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery.

Working across mediums including sculpture, painting and photography, Khan is well known for his large-scale works, which use techniques of layering to arrive at what might be considered the essence of an image, and to create something entirely new through repetition and superimposition. For his exhibition at Victoria Miro Mayfair, Khan has produced large-scale composite photographs made from a series of oil stick paintings. These have gone through an intensive process of overlaying lines of writing repeatedly painted onto a minimal ground, until the language becomes obscured. Documenting the journey of the paintings, Khan collects details of the line from every angle, and in doing so has the ability to constantly change its nature. The words are a response to the barrage of media images of conflict that are ‘un-escapable’ in today’s world. By using Roland Barthes’ theory of the ‘punctum’, Khan writes about a certain personal touching detail of an object or person that jumps out of the photograph and holds his gaze.

The exhibition also includes a series of five 12 x 16 inch platinum prints, whereby a negative is made the same size as the finished image; it is then contact printed onto a sheet of paper painted with platinum and iron salts, and finally exposed in daylight. Titled Church Walk Studio, these delicate, richly toned images have the quality of watercolour, which furthers Khan’s intrigue into pushing the boundary between a painting and a photograph.

Idris Khan’s work is a continuous process of creating and erasing, adding new layers whilst retaining traces of what has been. Often addressing philosophical or metaphysical themes in his work by superimposing thousands of photographic moments into one single image, he creates an expanded sense of time. The final photographs show Khan’s ability to capture the impossibility of seeing every stage of a painting.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with a poem by Imtiaz Dharker.

Born in Birmingham in 1978, Idris Khan received his MFA from the Royal College of Art in 2004 and lives and works in London. He has exhibited internationally, including recent solo shows at the Whitworth Gallery, University of Manchester (2012); Sadler’s Wells, London (2011); Gothenburg Konsthall, Sweden (2011); Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2010); Kunsthaus Murz, Murzzuschlag, Austria (2010) and K20, Düsseldorf (2008). His work is soon to be featured in a group show at The National Gallery of Art, Washington (2015); it has recently been included in exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (2014); Bas Museum, Miami (2013); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, Florida (2013); The British Museum, London (2012); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (2012); Fundament Foundation, Tilburg (2011); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); and Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin (2009). In 2014 Khan collaborated with choreographer Wayne McGregor and Composer Max Richter to produce stage designs for Kairos included in STEPS, Switzerland’s contemporary dance biennale. In March 2015 Victoria Miro showed a solo presentation of work by Idris Khan at Art Dubai.