Drawing inspiration from sources including the history of art and music as well as key philosophical and theological texts, Idris Khan is widely acclaimed for works that investigate memory, creativity and the layering of experience. At TEFAF New York, Sean Kelly is presenting a stamped painting from the artist’s most recent series Time Present, Time Past, which expands his exploration of repetition, color, and the transcendental potential of abstraction.

Grounded in jewel-like hues, the works in the series function as psychological and spatial fields—expansive, immersive, and affecting. Each painting is carefully stamped with layers of musical notation, as in the work on view at TEFAF, or Arabic text, gilded by hand. The use of gold leaf carries historical and symbolic resonance, referencing Islamic artistic traditions, where material, color, and language converge in devotional practice. Poetic and meditative, with only their edges remaining legible, language or notes fold in on themselves and meaning dissolves into form.

Since completing his Master’s Degree with a Distinction in Research at the Royal College of Art in London in 2004, Idris Khan (British, b. Birmingham 1978) 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.

Drawing on diverse cultural sources including literature, history, art, music and religion, Khan has developed a unique narrative involving densely layered imagery that inhabits the space between abstraction and figuration and speaks to the themes of history, cumulative experience and the metaphysical collapse of time into single moments. Khan’s oeuvre has expanded to include sculpture and painting. For sculptural works, using materials such as steel plates, cubes and horizontal stone slabs, Khan sandblasts the surface with templates of musical scores or prayers, continuing his investigation into the ways in which cultural, visual, cinematic and temporal memories coalesce into a dense, synesthetic whole.

In 2024, Idris Khan had his first solo American museum exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum. In 2026, The Obama Presidential Center commissioned Khan's Sky of Hope, a monumental ceiling installation that layers thousands of hand-stamped words from President Obama's Selma speech honoring Civil Rights leaders, transforming the ceiling into a radiant field of color and language. Khan has also had solo exhibitions at international venues including The New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall, England; Whitworth Gallery, University of Manchester, England; the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Canada; K20, Dusseldorf, Germany; and Gothenburg Konsthall, Sweden. He has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions at venues including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Britain, London, England; Hayward Gallery, London, England; The Saatchi Gallery, London, England; Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; Baibakov Art Projects, Moscow, Russia; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Helsinki Kunsthalle, Finland. In 2017 Idris Khan was appointed an OBE for services to Art in the Queen’s Birthday 2017 Honors List.

His work is in the permanent collections of many institutions worldwide such as The Saatchi Collection, London, England; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.

Idris Khan lives and works in London, England.