London-based artist Idris Khan was born in the UK in 1978. Since completing his Master’s Degree with a Distinction in Research at the Royal College of Art in London in 2004, Khan has received international acclaim for his minimal, yet emotionally charged photographs, videos and sculptures and is without question one of the most exciting British artists of his generation.

Appropriating icons of literature, music, and art, Khan methodically layers his material, whether it is Beethoven’s symphony, Milton’s Paradise Lost, or Bernd and Hilla Becher’s stylized sculpture of water towers. In speaking about his work, Khan says that “every layer is an effect that needs to be created... Each layer is a fallible human decision. There is a decision made as to what I want to keep and what has to disappear. This process allows me to cut out the camera completely.” Each layer in the resulting artwork adds complexity similar to a painter’s mark on a canvas. Khan’s photographs are not “taken”; they are built. The final composite image has the look and feel of a dense, quivering charcoal drawing.

Image | Music | Text presents a selection of Khan’s most powerful imagery to date, enjoying the intimacy of a book’s presentation while taking full advantage of the series’s generous format. The artist’s design incorporates three gatefold spreads, each measuring some thirty inches across.

The subject of numerous exhibitions at internations venues, Idris Khan’s work is in the permanent collections of many institutions worldwide such as The Saatchi Collection, London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.