LONDON—Victoria Miro Gallery is presenting the first U.K. solo exhibition by London artist Idris Khan through Sept. 30.

This exhibition runs in conjunction with the presentation of Khan's first film installation, A Memory After Bach's Cello Suites, a project jointly commissioned by Victoria Miro and inIVA, where it will be screened through Oct. 22.

In this new body of work, Khan re-photographs and digitally layers a sequence or series of pictures in an enigmatic play of appropriation and re-creation. His photographs possess characteristics more akin to drawing or painting and are presented as a kind of photographic palimpsest, animated by the accumulative intervention of the artist's hand. The influence of early proponents of the modern typology movement, Karl Blossfeldt and later, Bernd and Hilla Becher, has strong resonance in the Khan’s work.

Khan collapses and condenses series of images to create work that proposes new visual and conceptual terms to consider and distill historical photographic practice. According to the artist, his work offers “a playful emblem of our own departure from the corpse of photography, burdened with what the futurist Anton Guilio Bragaglia once referred to as its ‘glacial reproduction of reality.’”

Fascinated by the images, practitioners and theoretical writings that have influenced the history of photography, the artist has recently moved beyond the subject of photography to literature and music. Struggling to Hear....After Ludwig van Beethoven Sonatas, 2005, condenses sheets of music from Beethoven's piano sonatas to a single composite image. The work poignantly considers Beethoven's personal frustration with the deterioration of his hearing.Offering a visual replication of the composer's frustration, Khan suggests that the memory of music—its idea, shape and image—became more essential to Beethoven than its sound.

An enlarged page of multi-layered text from one of Freud's key psychoanalytic works forms the photograph Sigmund Freud's 'The Uncanny,’ 2006. The image challenges the viewer to digest all the essay's words in one glance. As the artist describes, “it's kind of a fantasy and a nightmare rolled into one—the wish fulfillment of apprehending a whole book in an instant, but the fear and anxiety of never being able to understand what the book wants to tell us.”

Returning to photography's historical archives, Khan's body of work entitled, Rising Series..... After Eadweard Muybridge 'Human and Animal Locomotion,’ 2005, looks back to early scientific experimentation with photography. This series of five platinum prints borrows images from Muybridge's sequential motion studies of human and animal form. Khan's intimate works, both in scale and subject, realise an aesthetic and narrative quality far removed from the scientific pedigree of Muybridge's research

Khan affords similar treatment to the photographs of plant segments collected by pioneering 19th century photographer Karl Blossfeldt. Some 6,000 plants were captured on film as a pedagogical record in Blossfeldt's book, “Art Forms in Nature,” as he sought to expound the principle that “nature is our best teacher.” Khan's ghostly Blossfeldt..... After Karl Blossfeldt 'Art Forms in Nature,’ 2005, belies its natural origins and solicits a psychological mood and relationship with the work, formerly extracted by Blossfeldt's meticulous documentation of characteristic, detail, pattern and texture of nature.