One of a number of new works unified by the use of the colour blue, So many all of nothing, 2020, is a large-scale painting featuring passages of texts in which Idris Khan expresses thoughts, feelings and responses to 2020. 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. Diaristic in nature, these texts, once repeated and layered in sonorous blue oil, are distilled, a number 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. 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. For the artist, the significance of the colour blue lies in how ‘it can have an immediate effect on emotion. I think it can have a positive or negative effect on the eye.’

Born in Birmingham in 1978, Idris Khan OBE, lives and works in London. 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. In 2023, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, will present the first career survey exhibition by the artist in the United States. Idris Khan: The Seasons Turn, an exhibition of new work by the artist, opens at Victoria Miro in April 2021.