Idris Khan was born in Birmingham, England in 1978 to a Pakistani father and Welsh mother. He studied photography at the University of Derby and completed his MA in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art in London in 2004. His practice draws on diverse cultural sources including literature, classical music, history, philosophy and religion.
Artist Idris Khan was born in Birmingham, England in 1978 to a Pakistani father and Welsh mother; the same year, his family moved to Walsall, in the Midlands, where he attended the local college. He studied photography at the University of Derby (1998–2000) and completed his MA in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art in London in 2004, after which he developed a successful professional career.
Khan's practice draws on diverse cultural sources including literature, classical music, history, philosophy and religion. He experiments with different media, including photography, video, painting and sculpture. Situated between abstraction and figuration, his minimal work is often characterised by densely layered imagery and a juxtaposition of images and text. The ideas of time and memory, and the process of layering are present throughout Khan’s oeuvre. One of his earliest experiments in 2003 involved superimposing 380 photographs taken during his travels around Europe. Khan then enacted the same process with every page of Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Roland Barthe’s Camera Lucida, and Bernd and Hilla Becher’s inventory of industrial structures. A liberal Muslim, Khan’s father encouraged him to attend local mosques and taught him to read the Qur’an. It was at his suggestion that Khan photographed every page of the holy book, producing one of his most powerful works, Holy Qur’an. After scanning all the pages, he condensed and digitally layered them into an ‘image-testament’ celebrating the devotion of those who read and follow the Qur'an. The work explored the relationship between memory, faith and language and investigated the ritual of reading and re-reading the sacred text, as well as the process of teaching and learning, of contemplation and reflection across time. Thanks to this work, Khan's reputation rapidly rose to prominence.
Major sources of inspiration for Khan’s work are both music and sound, explored through the scores of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Schubert, among others. After photographing sheets of music, Khan compresses them into abstract monochrome images, layer upon layer, so that we can view the entire musical score on one page, as exemplified by Bach… Six Suites for the Solo Cello (2006, Government Art Collection). The work has a haunting, ghostly quality and the blurred movement animates the piece highlighting the process of both the original score and the artist's re-creation. Khan explained that ‘it's obviously not about re-photographing the photographs to make exact copies, but to intervene and bring a spectrum of feelings - warmth, humour, anxiety - to what might otherwise be considered a cool aloof image. You can see the illusion of my hand in the layering […]. The opacity of every layer is a different fallible, human decision' (Government Art Collection). In 2012, Khan was commissioned by the British Museum to create a wall drawing for the exhibition Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, devoted to the 'hajj' – the once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage which Muslims are expected to make to Mecca. In the same year The New York Times commissioned Kahn to produce five photographic works for their London issue, including London Eye, which appeared on the cover of the magazine.
In 2017 Khan was awarded an OBE for his services to art, the same year he received the American Architecture Prize for his design of Abu Dhabi’s Wahat Al Karama, a memorial park paying tribute to members of the UAE who lost their lives in military service (2016). In 2018, he was commissioned to create 21 Stones, the British Museum’s first site-specific artwork as part of the new Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World. Khan’s 21 drawings were based on ‘Stoning of the Devil’, a ritual that takes place during the annual Islamic Hajj pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. Each piece was made with a unique piece of poetry, stamped with blue oil paint on paper mounted on aluminium using a new archival process. In November 2021, as part of the One Blackfriars Public Art Programme, he unveiled the sculpture 65,000 Photographs on London’s South Bank. For this monumental column, Khan used his personal archive of images from the past six years – some 65,000 images - to investigate the obsession with mass-image-making, while drawing attention to the almost forgotten art of photographic printing. Idris Khan's work is represented in major UK public collections, including the British Museum and Government Art Collection. Khan continues to live and work in London. He is married to sculptor Annie Morris, with whom he shares a studio in Newington Green, north-east London.