Ibrahim El-Salahi

Ibrahim El-Salahi (إبراهيم الصلحي, born 5 September 1930) is a Sudanese painter, former public servant and diplomat.

He is one of the foremost visual artists of the Khartoum School, considered as part of African Modernism and the pan-Arabic Hurufiyya art movement, that combined traditional forms of Islamic calligraphy with contemporary artworks.

Ibrahim El-Salahi was born on 5 September 1930 in El-Abbasyia, a neighborhood of Omduran, Sudan, to a Muslim family and is considered to be one of the most important contemporary African artists.

His father was in charge of a Qur'anic school, where El-Salahi learned to read and write and to practice Arabic calligraphy, that later became an important element in his artwork.

He also is a distant cousin of Sudanese human rights lawyer Amin Mekki Medani.

From 1949 to 1950, he studied Fine Art at the School of Design of the Gordon Memorial College, which later became the University of Khartoum.

His first period during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s is dominated by elementary forms and lines.

During the next two decades, El-Salahi used more subtle, earthy tones in his color palette.

In Ibrahim El-Salahi's own words: "I limited my color scheme to sombre tones, using black, white, burnt sienna, and yellow Ochre, which resembled the colors of earth and skin color shades of people in our part of the Sudan. Technically it added depth to the picture".

The color selection that El-Salahi chose in this formative period reflected the landscape of Sudan, trying to attempt to connect larger concerns of society, whilst creating a unique Sudanese aesthetic through his work.

Supported by a scholarship, he subsequently went to the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1954 to 1957.

At this art school, El-Salahi was exposed to European schooling, modern circles, and the works of artists that gradually influenced his art.

Studying in London also allowed him to take formal and ideological cues from modernist painting, which helped him to achieve a balance between pure expression and gestural freedom.

In 1962, he received a UNESCO scholarship to study in the United States, from where he visited South America.

From 1964 to 1965, he returned to the US with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, and in 1966, he led the Sudanese delegation during the first World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, Senegal.

Writing in the Financial Times, critic Jackie Wullschlager said much of El-Salahi's works from this period "are infused with the relentlessly bright Sudanese light, earthy colour and a palpable sense of a parched landscape and dry hot air," noting that works like Vision of the Tomb (1965) typify this style, with "half-perceived shapes and colours emerg[ing]" from the dusky background.

After this period, his work became meditative, abstract and organic, using new warm, brilliant colors and abstract human and non-human figures, rendered through geometric shapes.

Much of his work has been characterized by lines, while he mainly uses white and black paint.

As El-Salahi has summarized, "There is no painting without drawing and there is no shape without line ... in the end all images can be reduced to lines."

In addition to representing Sudan in the World Festival of Black Arts, El-Salahi was part of the Sudanese delegation at the first Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969.

Both of these events were important and significant in modern African art movements.

After the completion of his education, he returned to Sudan.

During this period, he used Arabic calligraphy and other elements of Islamic culture that played a role in his everyday life.

Trying to connect to his heritage, El-Salahi began to fill his work with symbols and markings of small Arabic inscriptions.

As he became more advanced with incorporating Arabic calligraphy into his work, the symbols began to produce animals, humans, and plant forms, providing new meaning to his artwork.

El-Salahi learned to combine European artistic styles with traditional Sudanese themes, which resulted in an African-influenced kind of surrealism.

From 1969 until 1972, El-Salahi was assistant cultural attaché at the Sudanese Embassy in London.

After that, he returned to Sudan as Director of Culture in Jaafar Nimeiri's government, and then was Undersecretary in the Ministry of Culture and Information until September 1975.

In 1975, he was imprisoned for six months and eight days without trial for being accused of participating in an anti-government coup.

At the time of El-Salahi's period of incarceration, many intellectuals and some members of the Sudanese Communist Party were sent to prison.

El-Salahi's freedom was stripped in Kober Prison in Khartoum; prisoners were not allowed to write or draw, and if a prisoner was to be caught with paper or pencil, he would be punished with solitary confinement for fifteen days.

Despite this, El-Salahi was able to find a pencil and often used the brown paper bags that food was distributed with to draw on.

El-Salahi would tear the bag into numerous pieces and could use the 25 exercise minutes he received everyday to sketch out ideas for huge paintings.

He would also secretly sketch and bury small drawings into the sand to maintain his ideas.

El-Salahi' recalled that the security director told him that they decided to release him, and had it not been for Bona Malwal they would never have released you, because he was supposed to be executed.

El-Salahi was released on 16 March 1976, and did not keep any of the drawings he made in prison; he left them all buried.

Next, he rented a house in the Banat region of Omdurman for a short period of time.

Two years after his release from prison, he exiled himself from Sudan and for some years worked and lived in Doha, Qatar, before finally settling in Oxford, United Kingdom.

El-Salahi's work has developed through several phases.

On the occasion of the Tate Modern gallery's first retrospective exhibition of a contemporary artist from Africa in 2013, El-Salahi's work was characterized as "a new Sudanese visual vocabulary, which arose from his own pioneering integration of Islamic, African, Arab and Western artistic traditions."