It’s not often that visitors get to see an entirely new side of an artist as celebrated as Ibrahim El-Salahi. Yet Vigo Gallery has brought together a remarkable selection of rarely seen early paintings by the Sudanese modernist, offering a glimpse into a pivotal chapter of his career. Dating from his student years at London’s Slade School of Fine Art between 1955 and 1957, the works show the artist’s experimentation, where he began to dismantle traditional forms of representation in pursuit of his own distinctive visual language.
Titled “Pre-Pixel,” the presentation brings together works from the artist’s family collection, most of which have never been publicly exhibited. “He starts breaking down the pictorial plane,” Vigo Gallery’s Sebastian Salisbury told Artsy, describing a crucial turning point in the artist’s development. The fragmented forms and geometric structures of his Untitled paintings from 1956 and 1957, for instance, demonstrate his growing interest in breaking images into smaller, interconnected parts. Their gridlike compositions give the impression of pixels, evoking the visual language of digital imagery decades before its emergence.
Often described as a pioneer of African modernism, El-Salahi became the first artist from the continent to receive a retrospective at Tate Modern in 2013. His celebrated practice would go on to fuse Arabic calligraphy, African visual traditions, and Western modernism. Here, visitors encounter the beginnings of that artistic language. Works are priced from £145,000 ($191,265) to £400,000 ($527,630).
—A.K.
