For the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Sean Kelly, Los Angeles is pleased to announce The Pattern of Landscape, a new body of work by Idris Khan. The show features large scale paintings, bronze sculptures, watercolors on paper, and photography. The exhibition is notable for a series of profound developments in Khan’s work which incorporates both music and text for the first time. 

For Khan, the combination of music and text is his way of representing the rhythm of the world reverberating through daily life. He presents both languages simultaneously with music as the universal language. Compositionally, these paintings present a formal departure from Khan’s earlier Rhythm Paintings, which featured a line bisecting the canvas to create two separate blocks of text. In these new works, Khan leaves an exposed band of pure color across the bottom of the painting, untouched by music or text, hovering as if part of a pictorial and cultural landscape.

Over the past year, Khan has expanded his interest in, and experimentation with, color, especially through his works in watercolor. Focused on nature and the changing seasons, his first forays in this direction were inspired by Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. His new watercolors take inspiration from Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, a historically evocative piece of music that is cathartic in its composition. This inspired Khan to create a series of twenty-two works that use bold, uniquely mixed colors to mimic the emotional lyrical tone of the music.

Khan’s photographs possess characteristics more akin to drawing or painting and are presented as a kind of palimpsest, animated by the accumulative intervention of the artist’s hand. He appears to suggest that our linear experience of time and place has a more shadowy relationship with memory and the subconscious and that they cannot be so easily grasped.