Idris Khan

The London-based artist Idris Khan (born 1978) is internationally recognized for a densely layered, poetic body of work imbued with echoes and reverberations. Across painting, photographic prints, watercolors, works on paper, sculpture and video, his art consistently engages with repetition and ritual. To that end, Khan draws inspiration from culturally coded sources and artifacts (such as musical scores and theological texts), exploring themes including history, religion, music and cumulative experience.
Repeat after Me chronicles the development of the artist’s practice across more than two decades, from early monochromatic photographic works to a new series of abstract watercolor compositions that encapsulate the essence of iconic paintings of the 16th–18th centuries through their use of color. In honor of his first US exhibition, this catalog features essays by curator Marcelle Polednik and art critic David Carrier, and a conversation between Idris Khan and artist Edmund De Waal.

London-born Idris Khan (born 1978) layers various kinds of found imagery—for example, every page of the Quran, the scores for Beethoven's sonatas or every J.M.W. Turner postcard from Tate Britain—in a way that condenses the colors and shapes so much that they become abstract.