Idris Khan: Repeat After Me

Idris Khan is an artist comfortable operating in the interstitial zones between translation and interpretation, absence and presence, and a more expansive apperception of art historical indexicality. His first one-person show in the United States, in Santiago Calatrava’s soaring wing of the Milwaukee Art Museum brings together multiple, distinct phases of the artist’s career that evince a restless search to capture the generic profundity of meaning in itself. Along the way he leaves room for discursive detours of misinterpretation that wind up opening virtual pathways of romantic longing. There’s a meditative atmosphere enveloping the assembled works, which share a spiritual kinship with Caspar David Fredrich’s lone, contemplative witnesses of dawning and crepuscular mists; both strain vainly for a sense of rootedness in the phenomenally felt, yet dimly perceived, void. Khan’s work ostensibly reimagines an abstract form of the sublime atavistically derived from the Northern Romantic tradition and further filtered through artists such as Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman, as Robert Rosenblum posited of that generation of painters. Rosenblum’s tradition of the Romantic sublime is a capacious one, encompassing the underdetermined (misty and obscurant stillness as in Friedrich) and overdetermined (roiling and mounting in volume, as in Turner). Khan provocatively combines both the quietest register and the cacophonous one, so that an uncertain inertia sets in. His modus operandi is the overwritten palimpsest, and his ultimate intent seems to be the suspension of final inscription, and hence a definitive read of representational meaning. He does this via the technical means of photography, re-photography, overprinting with stamps, and with more traditional media such as chalk and charcoal drawing and sculptural casting (the latter two extruded through the artist’s characteristic scrim of re-photography).

At the start of the exhibition, one is introduced to Khan’s earliest works, which appropriate the generic typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher and Karl Blossfeldt’s “Neue Sachlichkeit” (New Objectivity) macro-photography of botanical subjects. The Bechers are subject to homage in every…Bernd And Hilla Becher Gable Side Houses, (2004), while Khan represents Blossfeldt’s phrase with Blossfeldt……After Karl Blossfeldt 'Art Forms in Nature' (2005). Both images are generated by a process of digital overlay of multiple images ultimately printed through traditional photographic means, which serves to blur the specificity of any discrete image into a cloud of non-specificity, essentially extending and adumbrating the generic parameters that first inspired both the Bechers and Blossfeldt. A technical precedent can be seen in Nancy Burson’s composite portraits of the early 1980s in which she would, via computer manipulation, overlay photographic typologies of beauty, power, and organic mutation, yet Khan’s made a much deeper investment in the uncanny resemblances cobbled from multiple exposures of approximately like images. His approximations present like manifestations of liminal memories that can never be fully assimilated, as in Borges’s allegory of implacable memory in his short story “Funes The Memorious,” which portrays an individual so tortured by a supernaturally retentive memory, that even his dreams are beset by endless translations of both significant and forgettable events. In a gallery talk associated with the exhibition, Khan related how the increasing amplitude of image generation in the last two decades represented for him an opportunity to try to instantiate that phenomenon via an arrested, and perhaps more obdurate, form. By way of illustrating this phenomenon, a work entitled, every...William Turner Postcard from Tate Britain (2004), depicts the Romance era artist as commercially-made cliché, through a work that conglomerates these hawked, overprinted souvenirs to the extent that the “Lorrain light” that Turner strove for becomes a mere smoky smudge in time.

The artist has said that his upbringing in a household headed by a practicing Muslim father, who early on instructed his boy on the traditional repetition of prayer in the Qur'an, the Dhikr, might have influenced his mature aesthetics. A work entitled every... page of the Holy Qur'an (2004) portrays that in a way that obfuscates both text and spiritual meaning, or, rather, displaces such meaning into the vernacular of art. One might extrapolate that every decent artist is an apostate to some great degree. The scale of Khan’s work increases as it proceeds chronologically. Bach...Six Suites for the Solo Cello (2006), approximately 8 by 6 feet, forms an image from the repetition of musical tablature that reads as horizontal wavelengths of silent and staid inscription. Another autobiographical reference is introduced, as the artist’s mother was a classically trained musician who often left sheet music casually about the house. During the museum walk-through, Khan related his mother’s withdrawal via the onset of mental illness, and that to some extent, works such as this approach an homage to both her music echoing through the house and its subsequent, palpable, absence. These subjective references aren’t really necessary to appreciate the stark beauty of the piece, yet can illuminate the yearning gravitas that suffuses this exhibition.

The entire middle section of the installation, for instance, is taken up with large images in monochromatic hues of saturated cyan blue, setting an overall mood of dedicated contemplation. Held, slanting in the sky (2022) is an unframed, oil-based ink on gesso composition that employs musical notation in a more overall, random patterning derived from the artist’s use of the stamps he fabricated for this purpose. Its floating rectangle above a threshold bar at the image bottom recalls Rothko’s classic stacked format, yet with none of Rothko’s expressive brushwork. The mechanics of image making preoccupies Khan in almost equal proportion to the resulting minimalist and hieratic—almost ceremonial—images. Besides the obvious nod to modernist notions of laying bare the influence of mechanical reproduction, it’s also fascinating, considering again the artist’s cultural heritage, to contemplate the history of Islamic pattern and architectural decoration, using texts as design, and eschewing the figurative.

Khan’s most recent works break up into forms that more explicitly constitute a whole, namely arrays of smaller, framed works in geometric groupings. Personal subject matter leaks in more explicitly in a series of works the artist made in the countryside in Sussex, while in COVID retreat from London. The Seasons Turn (2021) is a grid made up of twenty-eight individually framed oils on paper. These are much more viscerally present than the majority of the works in the exhibition, the artist’s hand in each composition repeats certain, earlier linear and geometric motifs, yet much more loosely, verging on expressionist. Khan’s palette is also more expansive here, encompassing subtle ranges of spectral hues. The COVID interval seems also to have inspired a subsequent body of work in the artist’s “Rhythm in Colour” series (2022–23), which are made up of gestural marks in watercolor.

A return to the conceptual winds up the show in a group of works that take inspiration from specific palettes of old master painters, such as After The Tomb (2023), which was prompted by Zurbarán’s Saint Francis of Assisi in His Tomb (1630–34), a painting in the museum’s own collection. This repeated tack of Khan’s art historical transposition neatly bookends the exhibition and implies a more refined direction for the artist, one in which art as an institution, and the institutions of art, might come into equal play.