Idris Khan’s immense new paintings and a single monumental wall drawing are big, bold artistic statements. Here, the British artist departs from his photography-based style and takes a more painterly approach. The works are dark, black explosions bursting out of fields of grey.
Made up of layer upon layer of words, the shapes draw you in but their meaning is obscured. Only around the edges is anything legible and even then only as a series of fragments. The words are the artist’s reactions to Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ – so it’s possibly of some relief that the whole thing is so hard to read. At any rate, this is art that works best from a distance. Like a series of gothic snapshots of some huge cosmic event, it's intense and impressive – just don’t get too close.
Eddy Frankel