Seasons Turn: “Idris Khan: Repeat After Me” at Milwaukee Art Museum

Marking his first solo U.S. exhibition, Idris Khan’s “Repeat After Me” at the Milwaukee Art Museum is an impressive and expansive overview of the artist’s creative evolution thus far. Beginning with his early digital work in photography, video and sculpture, leading us into his more recent work in painting, and culminating in a new collection of watercolor works created specifically for the show, viewers are given a masterfully curated insight into the artist’s unique creative language. Khan’s work uses repetition as the main recurring motif regardless of medium, exploring themes such as time, memory and loss. Following a chronological timeline, each gallery is both an exciting departure and a continuation from the last as we travel along with Khan in discovering how repetition can be used to better understand time and remembrance.

The show begins with Khan’s early work in photography in which he takes existing media of a similar subject matter and meticulously layers them all into one large file. The resulting images are blurred, overly saturated and difficult to comprehend—and they are meant to be. Khan has stripped away the preconceived understanding that photography produces clear, carbon copy images of one moment in time and instead has created deeply layered and complex works exploring time itself. His works such as “every…William Turner Postcard from Tate Britain” (2004) feel deeply familiar yet distant almost as though they are the result of closing your eyes and conjuring up a William Turner painting from memory.

Idris Khan, “Overture,” 2015, oil on glass with aluminum frame, 96″ x 78″ x 156″/Photo: Idris Khan and Sean Kelly

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Following his work with photography, we move onto his text-based work. Applying the same methodologies from before, Khan combines every scanned page of a book into one single image. Just as with the subject matter of the photographs, the “subject” or text becomes impossible to discern. However, it is not the text itself that is important but rather the resulting powerful visual story. This is furthered once again in the next room in which the text from literature is replaced with musical compositions. It is here that his exploration of time really begins to resonate as each musical score exists in its entirety simultaneously.

The first half of the exhibition features Khan working primarily with pre-existing media. In one of the largest departures in the show, we now enter into an exciting place in his practice in which he begins to create pieces created solely by his own hand. It is also where we begin to see his work with sculpture and painting. Repetition remains the driving force behind his art but we are introduced to it being shown in a new light. His work “Overture” (2015), a large-scale sculpture featuring seven large panels of glass hanging vertically, one in front of the other, introduces his work with stamps and his exploration of global crisis and displacement. Each panel of glass is stamped repeatedly with his own writing, creating densely layered abstract shapes where the writing is illegible except for the edges of shapes where broken phrases start to become visible. The repetition becomes deeply personal in his work “My Mother,” a cast of around 360 stacked photos representing his mother’s entire life in photographs.

Idris Khan, “The Seasons Turn,” 2021, oil on mounted paper, twenty-eight panels, each: 25 1/2″ × 21 1/2″/Photo: Idris Khan and Sean Kelly

The exhibition once again takes new form as we begin to view Khan’s work with painting in “The Seasons Turn,” a collection of twenty-eight (seven for each season) watercolor works created during the COVID-19 pandemic. Each painting features colors specially chosen to represent a particular season and is stamped with the music of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” Through these works, not only do we see a continuation of his work with musical compositions and repetition, but we are also introduced to a new caliber of his artistic skill—his masterful use of color. When viewed together as one large piece, the colors converse with one another in a symbiotic relationship.

The final room features a new collection of paintings Khan has created specifically for the exhibition. Taking inspiration from five master paintings in the museum’s collection, he has created colorful reinterpretations of paintings stamped with musical compositions created with a digital program directly using the colors from each historical painting. The show is deeply compelling and brilliantly curated to create a powerfully intimate viewing experience. If you were to enter the show not knowing anything about Idris Khan, you will leave a fan excited and eager for future work.

“Idris Khan: Repeat After Me” is on view at Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 North Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, through August 11.