We are delighted to announce internationally acclaimed artist Idris Khan’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Khan is a seminal artist of his generation, known for his minimal, yet emotionally charged photographs, drawings, videos and sculptures. He has transformed texts, musical scores, dances and artworks into investigations of appropriation, time, and memory. Digitally layering photographs or film clips of the appropriated material, he creates dense accumulations that empathise with the past while engaging with contemporary discourses. Individual notes, words and images become translucent marks and traces that form new, contemplative, patterns and rhythms.

‘Beginning at the End’ introduces a transformative new body of work that reveals a deep investigation of creation – both of the self and of art. Inspired by the Black on Black works of many abstract expressionists, Khan uses black oil based ink on black-screened paper to create drawings that pay tribute to artists of the movement such as Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella, amongst others.    

Khan has created 10 passages of writing, and with each an artwork, responding to the words of 9th century Islamic philosophers such as Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and Al-Ghazali. For each piece, Khan committed a process of transcription and translation into Arabic, working with Louisa Macmillan (formally the Eisler curator of Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art at the British Museum). Creating different radial formations by hand stamping the Arabic script Khan directs his practice inwards towards a journey of self-discovery. The works transcend the essence of the words while containing the weight of the metaphysical concepts from which they were derived.

In the gallery itself Khan installs his fourth wall drawing, entitled ‘The Essence of this Existence’, by meticulously stamping the texts that make up the 10 drawings with black and blue oil-based ink onto a prepared gesso wall. The tension between the start of a work and its completion, between its essence and its meaning, are part of an exploration into the relationship art has to its creators and subsequently to its viewers.

Image: © Idris Khan, Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde