Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Idris Khan

I've been a huge fan of Idris Khan's ever since seeing his work at Miami Basel a couple of years ago. This 29 year old British photographer creates multi-layered images by repeatatively photographing and superimposing like images - usually appropriated from art and books - so that he ends up with a single photograph of things like every page of the score of Beethoven's sonatas or every William Turner postcard from Tate Britain. (Pictured below.)


It's conceptual and somewhat insidery but Khan's pictures are powerful, original, striking, and usually quite large. Strangely he does not seem to have made a huge impression in the States yet in spite of shows at Fraenkel in San Francisco and a recent three week show at Yvon Lambert in New York that came and went without notice.

Here are three more images - "Every ... Nicholas Nixon's Brown Sisters"; "Every... Bernd and Hilla Becher Spherical Type Gasholders"; and "Every ... Page of the Holy Koran".