Idris Khan toys with reputation

Idris Khan’s photographic work has always been concerned with repetition. The Birmingham-born artist, 31, has photographed sequences of images, the pages of entire books and musical scores, and layered and adjusted them digitally to create opaque, near abstract shapes which hover before the viewer.

In this exhibition, he takes this reiteration a step further in his first foray into sculpture, making direct references to the minimalist Carl Andre (he of the famous Tate bricks). Quoting Andre’s Fall (1968), Khan takes 30 steel sheets, aligns 15 of them against the wall and mirrors them with the rest along the floor. Across the steel sheets, he has sandblasted several layers of the score to Bach’s Variations. In the dramatically lit gallery upstairs is Seven Times, a series of 144 steel cubes, each a scale model of the Kaaba in Mecca, which Khan inscribes with Muslim prayers in elegant Arabic script. The cubes are arranged in a grid which occupies the exact surface area of the Kaaba. Again, the work directly quotes an Andre sculpture.

Although Khan pays homage to minimalism, he also subverts it. Andre strived to empty content from his work, insisting on strict material, formal and spatial qualities. But Khan’s work is positively brimming with weighty themes: his Muslim background; his Welsh mother’s love of music and recent death; the nature of religion and its rituals; and faith’s relationship to art.

Khan’s touch is so deft that he complements rather than destroys the poise of the art that inspired him.
Until 24 April. Information: 020 7336 8109, www.victoria-miro.com

Idris Khan
Victoria Miro
Wharf Road, N1 7RW