Sum of its Parts

Fundamentally, music and color are designed to blend into their background. By the hands of artist Idris Khan, though, the physicality of a musical score or a color palette becomes the aesthetic itself—the building blocks of the artworks he shapes.

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In “After…” at Sean Kelly in New York, densely applied layers of musical notes coalesce in Rothko-esque, color-blocked compositions. For the show, the British artist, 45, looked to famous works in art history as inspiration: the Mona Lisa; Johannes Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window; and Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son—reinterpreting them as pure expressions of the prevailing colors therein. 

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Khan’s individual works comprise a cluster of canvases, arranged in neat, rectangular grids. In each piece, the canvases are coated with oil- and water-based inks to collectively represent the dominant colors in the corresponding Old Masters paintings. The larger the area of the canvas in Khan’s works, the more heavily its color was used in the source material. “After Lisa,” for instance—which draws on the iconic painting of the same name—is made up of nine canvass of varying sizes: the largest, a dark, earthy brown, the general shade of her hair and garment; and the three second-largest, a forest green, a musty acqua, and an ochre. Gaze at the original for a bit, and it clicks.

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“You get inspired by Old Master paintings, but sometimes you don’t look that close at the actual palette, or what makes that particular painting become a masterpiece,” says Khan. “I was asking: Can you strip an Old Master painting to its basic palette? And will it still have the power that the original painting had? Or the memory of that painting?”

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From there, the artist also devised a means to incorporate musical elements—music, and the shape of musical scores—being longstanding motifs in his practice. Khan discovered a software program he could use to translate the historical paintings’ color schemes into musical notes. The resulting musical scores, he explains, were made into a physical stamp applied to each panel, which, eventually, built up through many layers, created his completed visual compositions.

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“When you’re looking at those grids in the show, what you’re looking at is the palette, and also the notes that came from a reproduction of that painting,” Khan elaborates. “It’s almost creating a score of the sound of that work.”

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‍Idris Khan’s “After…” is on view until May 4, 2025 at Sean Kelly New York at 475 10th Ave, New York, NY 10018.