Idris Khan

Idris Khan, born in Birmingham, UK, in 1978, often combines art and artefacts from various spheres of literature, visual arts, and music in his photographic and video works. Exploring philosophical and theoretical ideas surrounding global displacement and conflict, Khan demonstrates his profound interest in language and meaning over a wide array of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, works on paper or glass. Khan has developed a unique narrative, drawing on diverse cultural sources including art, literature, philosophy, and music. His densely-layered imagery inhabits the space between abstraction and figuration encompassing aspects of history, cumulative experience, and the metaphysical collapse of time into a single moment.

Idris Khan studied photography at the University of Derby before graduating in 2004 from the Royal College of Art in London. Khan’s work has been shown internationally, including in recent solo shows at the Milwaukee Art Museum (2024), Château La Coste, Provence, France (2022), The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2019), The New Art Gallery Walsall (2017), The Witworth Art Gallery, Manchester (2017). His work has also been included in group shows at Palazzo Cipolla, Rome, Italy (2022), Bancaja Foundation, Valencia, Spain (2021), Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2021), the Drawing Room, London, UK (2019), the Pasquart, Biel (2017), the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2015). His work is in the public collections of the British Arts Council Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, The British Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National des Beaux Arts, Québec, The National Gallery of Art, London, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., National Gallery of San Francisco, Philadelphia Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 2019, Idris Khan was comissioned his first UK public sculpture, 65,000 Photographs, in One Blackfriars, London. In 2016, Khan designed a permanent public monument for the new Memorial Park in Abu Dhabi for which he was awarded the American Architecture Prize for the Design of the Year 2017. In the same year he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 2004, he received The Photographers’ Gallery Prize. Idris Khan lives and works in London.

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