London-based Idris Khan is best known for dense and beguiling photographic palimpsests, which he creates by re-photographing or scanning and digitally overlaying entire series of existing printed works into single composite prints. By carefully calibrating the opacity of each layer and optimizing incidental details, Khan’s digital composites buzz with traces of their component images. In the past, he tackled 19th-century motion studies by Eadweard Muybridge, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typologies of industrial relics, and paintings by Caravaggio and Rembrandt. In more recent work, Khan has applied a comparable strategy to musical compositions and philosophical texts, condensing their many printed pages into single emblematic images.
Born in Birmingham in 1978, Khan now lives and works in London. He had a major solo exhibition at K20, Düsseldorf in 2008 and has also exhibited at the, Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, 2009, Forum d'art contemporain, Luxembourg (2008), inIVA, London (2006), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2006) and Helsinki Kunsthalle (2005) as well as having his work in permanent Museum Collections at The Guggenheim, New York, Museum of New South Wales, Sydney and The De Young Museum San Francisco. He works with Victoria Miro Gallery. London, Yvon Lambert, Paris/New York, Thomas Schulte Gallery, Berlin and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.