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, he has received international acclaim for his minimal, yet emotionally charged photographs, videos and sculptures and is one of the most exciting British artists of his generation.

Drawing on diverse cultural sources including literature, history, art, music and religion, Khan’s work contains a unique narrative involving densely layered imagery that inhabits the space between abstraction and figuration and speaks to the themes of cumulative experience and the metaphysical collapse of time into single moments (METAPHYSICS – the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, identity, time, and space). His work can be considered both abstract and figurative as it takes lots of singular straight shot images and layers them, creating an overall slightly abstract collage of different moments in time condensed into one.

Since 1959 Bernd and Hilla Becher have been photographing industrial structures that exemplify modernist engineering, such as gas reservoirs and water towers. Their photographs are often presented in groups of similar design; their repeated images make these everyday buildings seem strangely imposing and alien. Idris Khan’s Every… Bernd And Hilla Becher… series appropriates the Bechers’ imagery and compiles their collections into single super-images. In this piece, multiple images of American-style gabled houses are digitally layered and super-imposed giving the effect of an impressionistic drawing or blurred film still.

Khan’s work interests me because of how he completely changes how we perceive everyday structures, among other things, and turning them into more ghostly, alien compilations of multiple moments in time condensed into one.

Image Analysis –

The image above (Prison Type Gasholders) shows a ghostly arrangement of some of the topographical series made focusing on gasholders by the Bechers’. The structures in the Bechers’ original photographs are almost identical, though for Khan the images’ contrast and opacity is adjusted to ensure each layer can be seen and has presence. Despite Khans work being very mechanised and of industrial subjects, their effect is of a soft ethereal energy. They have a spiritual quality in their densely compacted details and ghostly outlines. Prison Type Gasholders conveys a sense of time depicted in motion, as if transporting the old building, in its obsolete black and white format, into the extreme future.