Frieze Masters

For Frieze Masters, Vigo presents a solo presentation of rare Slade-period works by Ibrahim El-Salahi from the family’s collection, a significant body of material that has never previously been commercially available.

Titled Pre-Pixel, the presentation centres on a remarkable and little-known chapter in El-Salahi's artistic development: a period of radical experimentation in which the artist began dismantling the conventions of representation in search of an entirely new visual language.

Created during his studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London (1954 - 1957), these works reveal an artist moving beyond academic mastery into a phase of extraordinary formal invention. Landscapes dissolve into modular chromatic grids; portraiture is reconstructed through geometric compression; abstraction emerges through fragmentation, repetition, and structural image-building.

Seen today, these works feel strikingly contemporary, not because they anticipate technology in any literal sense, but because they engage with visual strategies that resonate strongly with later digital image culture: modular construction, compression, fragmentation, and layered systems of perception.

Yet their true significance lies elsewhere. These paintings represent the crucial hinge between the technically accomplished young painter who arrived in London and the artist who would go on to create one of the most original and recognisable visual languages in twentieth-century modernism. In these works, El-Salahi is actively breaking apart inherited pictorial systems to construct something entirely his own.

The modular fragmentation visible here becomes a vital transitional language - one that helps bridge the gap between his early figurative discipline and the mature bodies of work for which he later became internationally celebrated: the breakthrough Sudanese modernist works of the 1960s, the meditative black-and-white compositions, the great colour works, the Trees, and the serial accumulative logic of his later practice.