Idris Khan has often drawn inspiration from key philosophical and theological texts in his work, yet increasingly his own writings have become a conduit for investigating memory, creativity and the layering of experience. This recent large-scale painting is completed in a palette of blue, using the artist’s own mix of gesso, rabbit skin glue, slate dust, marble dust and Prussian blue and Ultramarine blue pigments. It features passages of texts in which Khan expresses thoughts, feelings and responses to the past year. Diaristic in nature, these texts, once repeated and layered in sonorous blue oil, are distilled, a number of fragmentary experiences and disparate ideas becoming a single image. In this manner, while Khan ultimately eradicates the meaning of the original text, he constructs an abstract and universal language. Khan explains, ‘I like the perception of seeing the paintings from a distance. They look like blocks of colour, and as you get closer you see the words being revealed. Gesso is a very absorbent surface, so the first layer sinks into it, almost freezing the words in time. And then as I layer, the language is eradicated. Often people ask me what’s written, but in the end it doesn’t matter. The words are there at the start of the process, but as I make the paintings, the words lose their meaning, and what’s left is an abstract painting of internalised thoughts.’

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.

About the artist

Born in Birmingham in 1978, Idris Khan OBE, lives and works in London. In 2023, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, will present the first career survey exhibition by the artist in the United States. A major survey exhibition was held at The New Art Gallery Walsall in February 2017, with solo presentations of the artist’s work previously staged at national and international institutional venues including The British Museum, London, UK; Whitworth Gallery; Manchester, UK; Gothenburg Konsthall, Sweden and Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto.

His work is in numerous institutional and private collections, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; LACMA, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art, London, Washington and San Francisco; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.