Idris Khan

Drawing inspiration from sources including 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 – often employ techniques of layering and repetition to realise fragmentary experience or disparate ideas as a single image or solid form. New works on view at Art Basel, Infinites – Between, 2019, and Lost, 2019, take musical notation, including a score by the Russian Romantic composer Sergei Rachmaninov, as a starting point. Overlaying his source material Khan opens up a new rhythmic language, bordering on abstraction. The works are unified by the use of the colour blue, which the artist describes as having ‘an immediate effect on emotion’.

A new public sculpture for London by Idris Khan, commissioned by St George’s Plc with London Borough of Southwark as part of the development of One Blackfriars, will be on view from October 2019.

Image: Idris Khan, Lost, 2019