After the setting sun

Color, Music, and the Passage of Time: The New Work of Idris Khan

To look at Idris Khan’s newest prints is to encounter something unexpected. For much of his career, Khan worked in a visual language built on restraint — layered, monochromatic, deeply considered. Color, in the expressive and abundant sense, was largely absent. That has changed dramatically, and the story of how it changed is as layered as the work itself.

It began, as so many shifts do, with a pause. During the Covid-19 lockdowns of the early 2020s, Khan — an artist defined by urban life — found himself in the countryside, with time to observe something he had rarely slowed down to notice: the way color moves through a landscape as the seasons turn. That period of quiet observation planted a seed.

It found fertile ground in an inspiration Khan had long carried: the music of Antonio Vivaldi, specifically The Four Seasons. Vivaldi’s ambition in that work was to translate the sensory world — the textures of winter, the warmth of summer — into pure sound. Khan recognized in that impulse something central to his own practice: the desire to capture time itself, to freeze what is always changing. Working with software that maps musical notes to color and tone, Khan began converting Vivaldi’s compositions into visual form, allowing music to generate his palette.

Then came Monet.

A visit to the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris — home to Monet’s monumental late series of water lily paintings — deepened the project further. Monet spent over a decade, from 1915 to 1926, painting eight large panels that followed the arc of light across his water garden at Giverny over the course of a single day. The ambition is almost philosophical: to hold a day still, to make a painting that is also a clock.

One panel in particular, Water Lilies – Setting Sun, became the direct inspiration for Khan’s work After the Setting Sun. From it, Khan selected six key colors and ran them through the same software process he had developed from his engagement with Vivaldi — translating each hue into musical notation. The result draws a quiet triangle between three artists across three centuries, each trying, in their own medium, to give permanent form to something perpetually in motion: the quality of light, the feel of a season, the passing of a day.

The physical works are as considered as the ideas behind them. For each of the six colors, the resulting musical notation is printed across three sheets of acrylic, mounted in aluminum and layered one in front of another. The notation radiates outward from the center of each sheet, growing more dispersed toward the edges. Seen through all three layers at once, the sheets combine into something dense and luminous at the core — almost a solid field of color — while at the periphery individual notes remain legible, trailing off as if released into open space.

What Khan has made, in the end, is a body of work about translation: music into color, color into notation, the ephemeral into the permanent. After the Setting Sun asks us to look at a print and hear, somewhere beneath it, both Vivaldi’s strings and the last light falling on Monet’s pond.