Idris Khan valuation
Layers hundreds of photographs, scores or pages into a single blurred, dense image.
Idris Khan was born in Birmingham in 1978 and studied at the Royal College of Art.
What a work by Idris Khan is worth
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Bio
Idris Khan was born in Birmingham in 1978 and studied at the Royal College of Art. His method, established while still a student, is accumulation: every page of the Quran, every Bernd and Hilla Becher water tower, every bar of a Beethoven sonata, every page of a Freud text, digitally superimposed into one image in which the individual layers cancel into a dense grey blur that is nevertheless legible as a subject. He later moved into painting with stamped and repeated text, blue oil-stick works, and large public sculpture including a memorial in Abu Dhabi. He was appointed OBE in 2017.
The photographic works exist in small editions, typically of three to six plus proofs, at specified sizes, and edition number, print date and size need establishing precisely — the same image at a different scale is a different work. Large-format prints of this kind are vulnerable to surface damage and to light, and face-mounted works cannot be repaired. The stamped paintings and oil-stick works on aluminium or canvas are unique and now lead the market. Works on paper and small editions are the accessible end.
At a glance
- Born
- 1978, United Kingdom
- Movement
- Contemporary art
Wahat Al Karama, and the commissions
In 2016 Khan was commissioned to make a memorial to the United Arab Emirates' war dead in Abu Dhabi: seven tablets of aluminium-encased steel cast with poems by the country's rulers. In 2025 the Obama Foundation commissioned a ceiling for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, hand-stamped with words from Barack Obama's speech for the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma marches.
He works in a studio in Stoke Newington that he shares with his wife, the artist Annie Morris, and has shown with Victoria Miro in London. Gallery records, with the edition and size, are what place a photographic work or a painting.
Derby, the Hajj wall drawing and the ballet
Khan took a degree in photography at the University of Derby in 2001 before the Royal College of Art. Photographing every page of the Quran was his father's idea. Other sources have included every Turner postcard sold at Tate Britain and the Bechers' spherical gasholders, and his videos layer performances in the same way, among them a three-channel work on Schubert's last three piano sonatas, filmed from many angles.
In 2012 the British Museum commissioned a wall drawing from him for the exhibition Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, with a sculpture in the Great Court, and The New York Times Magazine commissioned a series for its London issue. He has made a ballet with the choreographer Wayne McGregor and the composer Max Richter, and his work is in the Guggenheim, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Centre Pompidou.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
