LONDON.- Cristea Roberts Gallery is presenting a major solo exhibition by Idris Khan (b. 1978), the first dedicated to his editions, which traces four years of practice up to the present day. The exhibition, which is also the artist’s first show with the gallery, comprises new prints and wall mounted acrylic reliefs, comprised of layered musical notation and texts that appear to float, suspended in time.

For the last four years, Idris Khan has taken a markedly sculptural approach to printmaking, printing on multiple layers of acrylic to produce abstract editions. After the setting sun, 2025, a new series of six wall-mounted reliefs, exemplify this technique. This body of work, which is exhibited at the gallery for the very first time, is inspired by Soleil Couchant, 1914–1926, a painting of water lilies at dusk by the Impressionist Claude Monet (1840 – 1926), housed in the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris.

Each edition contains three layers of acrylic printed with multiple shades of ink. To select the colours, Khan isolated six of the core shades from Monet’s painting, using them as the kaleidoscopic range for the series. One of the final acrylic sheets features a layer of musical notation, generated by the artist using a unique form of technology that ascribes musical notes to tone and colour.

Through this blurring of characters, colour and script, Khan has created six dynamic new images which seem to explode outward from a central point.

They signify an act of erasure as well as renewal. If the Impressionists believed that the purpose of art was to capture the fleeting essence of nature and light, then by filtering Monet’s water scene to pure shades of sienna and azure, Khan distils the essence, rhythm and atmosphere of the sunset in new and striking forms.

A quiet mind finds what is true, and Listen without motive, made in 2022, are the earliest examples of the printmaking technique on show. The layers of text and word, inspired by the writings and meditations of the twentieth-century Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986), fuse together to create colourful abstractions. By obscuring meaning, the works become reminiscent of palimpsests, alluding to impermanence and forgotten knowledge through the use of repeated gesture and mark-making.

Khan is interested in acts of repetition and the significance of these processes when all meaning is stripped away. He adopts a multi-media approach, often using printmaking, sculpture and photography to experiment with composition and language.

Also on show, a group of twelve screenprints inspired by The Four Seasons, 1723, the classical masterpiece by Antonio Vivaldi (1678 – 1741). Each print comprises a different colour background on which Khan has stamped the central window with fragments of Vivaldi’s score, marking an attempt by the artist to restore the Old Master into a contemporary setting. The artist gives prominence to sheet music, the instructive notations typically reserved for the orchestral performances of musicians and composers.

Each artwork in The Four Seasons, 2024 is composed of six printed layers, ranging between light and dark tones of one colour. Structured within Khan’s familiar frame motif, the sheet music is included on the final layer of each print; it is almost translucent, as if floating from the surface.

This composition is used in a further series of four new larger screenprints with letterpress by Khan; a combination of a musical score window and overprinted text. The composition and colours of each work in After the reflection, 2025, derive from Claude Monet’s The Water Lilies – Green Reflections (Reflets verts), 1915–26, a painting that tracks the sun’s passage from sunrise into sunset.

Khan comments: “This exhibition feels like a moment of distillation- for me, it’s about drawing together years of thinking, of layering, of searching for rhythm in both language and silence. These works are built through repetition, not just of form but of thought where meaning is gently worn away and something quieter, more essen- tial, begins to emerge.

I was particularly drawn to the subtlety in Monet’s late work - how his colours feel like music, how they dissolve the boundary be- tween time and perception.

Translating those tones into printed layers, and introducing nota- tion that’s generated from colour itself, was a way of making the ephemeral more tangible.”

The exhibition closes with two new unique works, each comprised of a grid-like structure of individually framed elements. The colour palette of each work is informed by Edgar Degas’s (1834 - 1917) depictions of ballet dancers in the nineteenth-century and is overlaid with musical notation, as the artist continues to excavate and investigate the elements of masterpieces that came before, through ritual and repetition.

The artist’s first solo exhibition at Cristea Roberts Gallery is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring a text by writer and curator, Hammad Nasar. Khan is also the subject of a new episode of the Cristea Roberts Gallery podcast, Making a Mark, which delves into the lives of contemporary artists and their approach to drawing and printmaking.

Idris Khan was born in Birmingham, England, in 1978. He studied photography at the University of Derby and completed his Master’s Degree in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art in London in 2004.

In 2024 Khan had his first career survey exhibition in the United States, at Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin. Further recent solo exhibitions include Château La Coste, Provence (2022); New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall (2017); and The Whitworth, Manchester (2016 and 2012).

21 Stones, an installation of twenty one unique paintings, is currently displayed as a scattered formation on a dedicated wall at the British Museum, London. 21 stones was the museum’s first site-specific commission.

In 2023 Khan staged a two person exhibition with his partner, artist Annie Morris at Newlands House Gallery in West Sussex. The artist couple had a joint exhibition at Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, London in Autumn 2023.

Recent group shows include Moody Center of Arts, Rice Univer- sity, Houston; The Laing, Newcastle (2022); Fundación Bancaja, Valencia, Spain travelled to Palazzo Cipolla, Rome, Italy (2022); Kun- stmuseum Bonn, Bonn; Art Science Museum, Singapore (2021); Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Palais Populaire, Berlin (2020); The Whitworth, Manchester; Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019); and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2018).

Further commissions include a new wall drawing for the British Museum’s 2012 exhibition, Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam. In 2014 Khan collaborated with choreographer Wayne McGregor to produce a stage design for Switzerland’s contemporary dance biennale.

In 2016, the artist’s The UAE Memorial, a permanent public monument was unveiled in the Abu Dhabi Memorial Park, and went on to receive the American Architecture Prize. A major public sculpture for London by Khan, commissioned by St George’s Plc with London Borough of Southwark as part of the development of One Blackfriars, was unveiled in Autumn 2019. In 2017 Khan was awarded an OBE for services to art, and in 2023 he took part in the Islamic Arts Biennale, Saudi Arabia.

His work is held in numerous public collections across the world, including the British Museum, London; The Whitworth, Manches- ter; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; Musée National des Beaux Arts, Québec; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; de Young Museum, San Francis- co; and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

Idris Khan lives and works in London.