Idris Khan has built his reputation in multiple layers. He repeatedly scrawls or stacks images, creating hypnotic haunting palimpsests, buzzing and charged, dense with history and cultural memory. This is flat work made somehow three-dimensional. But in his new show at London gallery Victoria Miro, Khan goes properly solid and takes on sculpture.
One piece is a four-metre square sculpture made up of 15, tall, tightly packed fibre columns, painted in a light-sucking, despairing black. The slim spaces around the columns allow slivers of light to pass through the installation.
Cell, 2017, honeycomb and fibre, by Idris Khan. Courtesy of Victoria Miro
Khan has been researching first-person accounts of prisoners held at Saydnaya, Syria’s most brutal prison (no small claim). These prisoners were often crammed, 15 at a time, into cells designed for solitary confinement. The cells were darkened and prisoners often blindfolded, a horrible intimacy and isolation all at once, a perpetual night. A large painting meanwhile is made up of alternating dark bars, dizzying and modulating.
The centrepiece of the show is made up of 44 blocks of patinated bronze in various shapes and sizes, stamped with numbers and text; again testimonies of confinement and conflict. Other large paintings are built of these texts, fragments stamped over and over again till they are deafening, incomprehensible, erased in the clamour to be heard.
This is a dark, unsettling kind of minimalism, exercises in imagination rather than just formal experiments in mass and volume. But, as always, Khan pushes the legible trace into the abstract, generating strange resonances.
Short Words (from Residue Series), 2017; Counting Drips (from Residue Series), 2017; Searching for Light (from Residue Series), 2017; and Rhythms 21, 2017
White Window (Self Portrait) 3, 2017; White Window (Self Portrait) 2, 2017; and White Window (Self Portrait) 5, 2017, all bromide print on rag board and aluminium
Cell, 2017, honeycomb and carbon fibre; Forty Seven, 2017, acrylic on canvas; and Absorbing Light, 46, 2017, bronze
Installation view of ‘Idris Khan: Absorbing Light’ at Victoria Miro
INFORMATION
‘Idris Khan: Absorbing Light’ is on view until 20 December 2017. For more information, visit the Victoria Miro website
ADDRESS
Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW
-
Inside the gleaming new Comme des Garçons store in ParisComme des Garçons reveals a four-storey new retail space in Paris, housing lines previously only available in Japan, as well as exclusive reissues of Rei Kawakubo’s collectible furniture
-
Eva Jospin and Ruinart put the fizz in Frieze London 2023
Champagne house Ruinart brings artist Eva Jospin’s vision of its terroir to Frieze London 2023, and celebrates with a limited edition Jeroboam of Ruinart Blanc de Blancs
-
When Jasper Morrison met Giulio Cappellini
Jasper Morrison looks back on his collaboration with design visionary Giulio Cappellini, Guest Editor of the Wallpaper* October 2023 issue
-
Eva Jospin and Ruinart put the fizz in Frieze London 2023
Champagne house Ruinart brings artist Eva Jospin’s vision of its terroir to Frieze London 2023, and celebrates with a limited edition Jeroboam of Ruinart Blanc de Blancs
-
Whoosh! ‘Email is Dead,’ say the Design Museum and Intuit Mailchimp
Take an immersive tour through the history of email at the Design Museum in London
-
‘Darker, more sinister themes’: Paula Rego’s decade of self-discovery is the subject of a new London exhibition
Paula Rego’s ‘Letting Loose’, at Victoria Miro in London, considers the artist’s work from the 1980s
-
Tate Modern announces The Infinities Commission for rising contemporary artists
Tate Modern’s new Infinities Commission will support experimental work from around the world
-
Turner Prize 2023 exhibition unwrapped: inside Towner Eastbourne
The Turner Prize 2023 exhibition has opened inside the colourful Towner Eastbourne; delve into the work of the four nominees
-
Peruse the ICA print sale, marking the institute’s 75th anniversary
London’s ICA print sale, with Counter Editions, includes limited-edition prints from Chris Ofili, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, and more, available individually or as a box set
-
New glass sculpture creates a verdant wonderland at Apple’s Cupertino HQ
‘Mirage’ at Apple Park is the work of Zeller & Moye and artist Katie Paterson, a shimmering array of glass columns that snakes through the grounds of the company’s monumental HQ
-
Sarah Lucas at Tate Britain: humour, desire, domesticity
‘Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas’ at Tate Britain spans the four decades the artist’s career
