Important Notice

"I stopped practising religious rituals at the age of 14, but what holds of it is the idea of repetition, a cathartic way of overlaying and stamping away memories. I like the fact that I can draw from experience. In my works, it's about the energy and repetition that brings you to something else." - IDRIS KHAN

Contemporary British artist Idris Khan explores concepts of time, memory and image-making by creating works that are... "I stopped practising religious rituals at the age of 14, but what holds of it is the idea of repetition, a cathartic way of overlaying and stamping away memories. I like the fact that I can draw from experience. In my works, it's about the energy and repetition that brings you to something else." - IDRIS KHAN

Contemporary British artist Idris Khan explores concepts of time, memory and image-making by creating works that are composed of multiple, often repetitive, images that are layered on top of layer to form a composite whole. Khan utilises from a wide range of mediums at his disposal-photography, painting, sculpture, moving image or installation-and from a diverse spectrum of textual and visual sources, including art, religion, literature, philosophy, psychology, critical theory, music, as well as his personal and political history.

In his early works, Khan worked mainly in monochrome, often using texts from famous books, music sheets or art-including Susan Sontag's On Photography, Cy Twombly's 'blackboard' series, and even The Holy Qur'an, for instance-meticulously photographing each page/ image, and proceeding to add them on top of each other as sequential images, until the work, while recognisable in its original form, would nonetheless appear blurred, and completely eroded of any detail or legibility. In this act of repetition, the work acquires a new meaning. "There is the distinct sense of 'beating time', of going back and forth while simultaneously bringing a new creation into being. In the past, Khan's earlier works drew on pre-existing cultural artefacts and were about creating a whole from discrete parts, however his more recent series of works introduce another layer of mediation and are resolutely hand-made." (Re-Imaginings, Mumbai: Galerie Isa, online)

Created in 2017, the present lot is one such work in which the artist uses printed texts, often his own prose or poetry, which is then "stamped in densely overlaid geometric shapes on the surface of paintings, works on paper, sculptures and wall drawings. The texts are drawn from the artist's own writings in response to classic art historical, philosophical and religious tracts." (Galerie Isa, online) The resulting effect appears like an explosion of colour across the surface of his chosen medium, but upon closer inspection reveals itself as a careful meditative exercise.

This "performative process of prayer," as Oliver Basciano terms it, has its origins in Khan's diverse heritage. The son of a Pakistani surgeon and a Welsh nurse, Khan was raised as a Muslim, and taught to read The Holy Qur'an and attended the local mosques-all of which imbibed in him a sense of the spiritual, while still instilling a ritualistic habit of prayer and repetition. Although he stopped practising the religion in his teens, much of his work harks back to these personal roots. "Many artists use their work to decipher or process the world. This is not Khan's aim however. Instead he leads us away from the familiar, he pushes us into uncomfortable directions in which an image is both figurative and abstract, materially destructive and spiritually productive. Khan's work follows Adorno's dictum instead: 'estrangement from the world is a moment of art'." (Oliver Basciano, Idris Khan: A World Within, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2017)

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