Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of photographs by Idris Khan, from May 4 through June 30, 2006.
Khan creates multi-layered photographs, often of appropriated art and books, in a way that both augments the aura of the original and reveals the idiosyncratic trace of his own hand. Khan’s work explores the history of photography and literature, the beauty of repetition, and the anxieties of authorship. Whether his subject is the iconic typology of Bernd & Hilla Becher’s gas tanks, or the layers of each page of Vilém Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography, the power of cultural symbols are at the forefront of Khan’s oeuvre.
Idris Khan’s photographs often project an aspect of human fallibility not usually associated with traditional photographic representation. In the case of his photograph, every…Nicholas Nixon’s Brown Sisters, Khan layers each of the portraits the photographer Nicholas Nixon made of his wife and her three sisters over a twenty-year period, thereby creating an entirely new image. The photograph suggests, among other possibilities, a complex charcoal drawing, and simultaneously hides and reveals the power of the original.
In 2005 Khan’s work was seen in exhibitions at Victoria Miro Gallery and the Saatchi Gallery, London. Idris Khan graduated with an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in 2003. This is his first exhibition in the United States.
