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
-
Fulham FC’s new Riverside Stand by Populous reshapes the match-day experience and beyondPopulous has transformed Fulham FC’s image with a glamorous new stand, part of its mission to create the next generation of entertainment architecture, from London to Rome and Riyadh
-
A contemporary Mexican hotel emerges from a 16th-century ruin in MéridaA renovation project by Zeller & Moye, Mérida’s new Hotel Sevilla wears its architectural interventions lightly, mixing new brutalist elements into listed interiors and a palm-filled courtyard
-
Discover the cool and offbeat designs of jeweller Inesa KovalovaInesa Kovalova's jewellery celebrates a mix of mediums and materials
-
Out of office: The Wallpaper* editors’ picks of the week'Tis the season for eating and drinking, and the Wallpaper* team embraced it wholeheartedly this week. Elsewhere: the best spot in Milan for clothing repairs and outdoor swimming in December
-
Out of office: The Wallpaper* editors’ picks of the weekFar from slowing down for the festive season, the Wallpaper* team is in full swing, hopping from events to openings this week. Sometimes work can feel like play – and we also had time for some festive cocktails and cinematic releases
-
The Barbican is undergoing a huge revamp. Here’s what we knowThe Barbican Centre is set to close in June 2028 for a year as part of a huge restoration plan to future-proof the brutalist Grade II-listed site
-
Out of office: The Wallpaper* editors’ picks of the weekIt’s wet, windy and wintry and, this week, the Wallpaper* team craved moments of escape. We found it in memories of the Mediterranean, flavours of Mexico, and immersions in the worlds of music and art
-
Each mundane object tells a story at Pace’s tribute to the everydayIn a group exhibition, ‘Monument to the Unimportant’, artists give the seemingly insignificant – from discarded clothes to weeds in cracks – a longer look
-
Out of office: The Wallpaper* editors’ picks of the weekThis week, the Wallpaper* team had its finger on the pulse of architecture, interiors and fashion – while also scooping the latest on the Radiohead reunion and London’s buzziest pizza
-
Out of office: The Wallpaper* editors’ picks of the weekIt’s been a week of escapism: daydreams of Ghana sparked by lively local projects, glimpses of Tokyo on nostalgic film rolls, and a charming foray into the heart of Christmas as the festive season kicks off in earnest
-
Wes Anderson at the Design Museum celebrates an obsessive attention to detail‘Wes Anderson: The Archives’ pays tribute to the American film director’s career – expect props and puppets aplenty in this comprehensive London retrospective
