Idris Khan’s theoretically inquisitive images are composed of countless layers. For his Every… series begun in 2004, Khan photographed every page of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Quran, Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and seminal texts on the history of art and photography like Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida; this process was also extended to entire bodies of work such as Caravaggio’s late paintings and Bernd and Hilla Becher’s series of water tower photographs. The pages or images were then superimposed and digitally combined into a single composition. Due to the density of information, details become obscured through this accretion of layers and are thus transformed into abstract, ghostly traces. Rattling the idea of authorship, Khan simultaneously appropriates and pays elegiac tribute to these cultural artifacts. The subject of time pervades these composite images, for the labors of the writers and artists referenced by Khan, as well as his own, are visually condensed and compressed into one image. In 2012, Khan expanded this practice to produce similar composite images documenting his own processes of making and erasing marks on a chalkboard.

Born in Birmingham, England, Khan (b. 1978) earned a BFA from the University of Derby in 2000 and an MFA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2004. Since 2000, solo exhibitions of Khan’s work have been organized by Elementa in Dubai, Goethenburg Konsthall, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, K20 in Dusseldorf, and other venues. He has also participated in major group exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Tate Britain, Saatchi Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Art, and Baibakov Art Projects in Moscow, among others. In 2012, Khan created new works on commissions for the British Museum and The New York Times Magazine. His work is represented in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Art Gallery of New South Wales; and Tel Aviv Museum of Art.