Idris Khan and Annie Morris inaugurate Galerie ISA’s new space with a splash of blue
The works of Idris Khan and Annie Morris are on view at Galerie ISA until 20th February, 2020.
Blue has an enigmatic history, and versatile lingual existence. From feeling the blues to dancing to their beats, the word blue has come to mean a lot more than the colour. Inaugurating Galerie ISA’s new space, London-based artists, Idris Khan and Annie Morris have created a series of works addressing the colour blue. Both artists approach their work with the intention of taking the viewer on a thought-provoking journey. While both approach them differently they are essentially a form of an internalized review.
Khan’s work abstracts a very cerebral approach to decoding the elements of his art. Referencing multiple psychological and theoretical studies on colour, significant texts and musical scores that are reminiscent of his childhood, Khan starts to layer these ideas, both conceptually and physically, creating a palimpsest. Using secondary source material like sheet music, and pages from the Qur’an, he embarks on a very controlled and meticulous process of creating. They are often printed as large-scale C-prints on surfaces that make an intense optical impact. While the artwork continues to be two-dimensional, the act of layering and its resulting intensity communicates a volume. At the same time there is also an eradication of meaning of the source language, while embedding new meaning via the artists intention. The highlight of these new works, is a yet to be titled installation consisting of 3 glass sheets stamped with studio indigo ink, layered to form a volume of voices and of time.
Where Khan layers, Annie Morris stacks and draws-out her work from a far more emotional place. Morris evolved her now recognisable pigmented spheres, as a cathartic method of dealing with a personal tragedy. Sculpted in plaster and sand, the boulders are painted in natural pigments, in a palette that ranges from ultramarine to earthy ochre. In this exhibition she plays with variations of Klein’s blue, interspersed with other colours, which further highlights the implausible stability of these bulbous sculptures. Resting on cuboidal grey platforms, constructed in concrete and steel, the contrast of the sphere and cube alters the forms into shapes. A key feature of a sculpture is the viewer’s ability to move around it, yet somehow Morris manages to craft features that could potentially be viewed from a single perspective.
Khan and Morris are partners and share a space, even though their studios are separated. The exhibition acts as a common space for these two practices, where one can extract moments of exchange, engagement and process. For instance, in addition to colour studies the pair also work with iterations and repetitions as part of their process, each manifesting in very distinct formats. Even the curatorial design of the space plays to this circumstance. While Khan’s work guides you towards the walls, and creates a shell for Morris’s gestational forms, Morris’s sculptures create a soft foreground to Khan’s intense frames. In spite of the grand ceiling of Galerie ISA’s new space the entire exhibition has a very human scale, one that seems to communicate an intimate conversation. It is in the interpretation of this conversation the colour blue, and its inherent versatility, allows for every viewer to read the exhibition in their own way.
– Review by Devanshi Shah
