British artist Idris Khan is getting his first U.S. survey exhibition and the traveling show will debut at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2024, the museum announced Tuesday.
“Idris Khan: Repeat After Me” will follow more than two decades of work by the Birmingham-born, London-based multi-disciplinary artist and includes paintings, photography, sculpture, works on paper and video.
According to MAM, the artist – who was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to art – will also visit Milwaukee as part of the exhibition.
It is slated to be on view at MAM in the main Baker/Rowland Galleries April 5-Aug. 11, 2024.
“This exhibition builds on the Milwaukee Art Museum’s history of identifying groundbreaking artists and giving them a platform to present their work,” said Marcelle Polednik, Ph.D., the Donna and Donald Baumgartner Director of the Milwaukee Art Museum and the exhibition curator.
“Khan’s practice condenses human experience into images that are both tactile and conceptual, imbued with echoes and reverberations that evoke the flow of time in an innovative way. With this exhibition, the Museum invites our community to engage with Khan's poetic vision of memory and history.”
In addition to including acclaimed works like “every…Bernd & Hilla Becher Prison Type Gasholder,” “A,D.959. B,D.960. C,D.958…after Franz Schubert,” “Burnt Wood” and “The Seasons Turn,” the artist will also debut a series of abstract watercolors inspired by mass reproductions of iconic masterworks of art, in the exhibition.
There will also be an exhibition catalog published, and a series of events.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He can be heard weekly on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories.
