Sunday, February 21, 2010
Idris Khan
"Working with appropriated imagery, Idris Khan’s photos are all-encompassing composites, consolidating iconic cultural symbols of similar type into single ‘super-images’. In this selection of his every… series, Khan aggregates the work of renowned artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, famous for their vast photographic collections of buildings and industrial sites. Exposed in translucent layers, anchored by the compositions’ continuous shapes, the Becher’s gasholders and gabled houses loose their commanding simplicity and rigid formalism, descending into fractured and gestural blurs merely suggestive of the originals. Through this process of layering, Khan creates a poetic malleability from the fixed codes of history. Compressing the timeline of repetition into indivisible subsuming moments, his photos offer a glimpse into the sublime."
from Saatchi Gallery