Ibrahim El-Salahi: The Early Years, 1950 - 1968

Vigo Gallery presents Ibrahim El-Salahi: The Early Years, 1950–1963, an exhibition bringing together paintings and works on paper spanning a crucial period in the development of one of the foundational figures of African and Arabic modernism. Retained within the family collection, these works remained largely untouched and, in most cases, unframed. They have never previously been exhibited or offered for sale, although several were reproduced in the Tate Modern exhibition catalogue for historical reference.

Paintings from this period in El-Salahi’s career are exceptionally rare. It is rarer still for a concentrated group with a family provenance to be seen together outside a major institutional retrospective.

The Early Years follows El-Salahi’s journey from his beginnings as a young painter in Khartoum to his arrival at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1954, and through the period following his return to newly independent Sudan in 1957. It is the story of an artist absorbing, testing, rejecting and transforming ideas.

Born in Omdurman in 1930, El-Salahi grew up in a deeply religious household. His father was a Qur’anic teacher and calligrapher, and the visual rhythms of Arabic script formed part of his experience from childhood. He trained at the School of Design at Gordon Memorial College in Khartoum before receiving a Sudanese government scholarship to study at the Slade from 1954 to 1957. He arrived in London already an accomplished painter: UCL’s Slade Archive describes his pre-London portraits as confident demonstrations of his command of empirical representation.

At the Slade, El-Salahi explored how the eye perceives and interprets the external world. Students received intensive European academic training in anatomy, life drawing, perspective, visual perception and art history. He also excelled in lettering, while regular visits to the British Museum contributed to his developing engagement with calligraphy. His work nevertheless resists any simple division between a Sudanese “before”, a European education and the subsequent emergence of a mature artist.