Featured Artist: Ibrahim El-Salahi
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Loading... - Ernest Marfo
- 26 Sep 2022
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Ibrahim El-Salahiis considered to be one of the most important contemporary African artists. He was born on 5th of September 1930 in Omdurman Sudan to a Muslim family.El-Salahi learned to read and write and to practice Arabic calligraphy in a Quranic school run by his father. He is one of the leading visual artists of the “Khartoum School”, considered as part of African Modernism and the Hurufiyya art movement, that combined traditional forms of Islamic calligraphy with contemporary artworks.He combines painting and drawing often using motifs from African, Arab and Islamic art as well as Western references. And 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.
El-Salahi is the first African artist to have a retrospective at the Tate Modern in London.Hestudied Fine Art at the School of Design of the Gordon Memorial College, which later became the University of Khartoum. Supported by a scholarship, he later went to the Slade School of Fine Art in London where he was introduced to European schooling, modern circles, and the works of artists that gradually influenced his art.He was able to adopt stylistic and philosophical cues from modernist painting while studying in London, which enabled him to strike a balance between pure expression and gestural flexibility. After completing his degree at the Slade School of Art in London he returned to Sudan to teach in Khartoum. His time at the College of Fine and Applied Arts, there, sparked a movement now known as the Khartoum School of which El-Salahi was one of the founders.
El-Salahi was given a UNESCO fellowship in 1962, allowing him to study in the United States before travelling to South America. With the assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation, he returned to the US in 1964 and 1965. In 1966, he served as the leader of the Sudanese delegation at the inaugural World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, Senegal. El-Salahi was a member of the Sudanese delegation at the first Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969, in addition to representing Sudan at the World Festival of Black Arts. These two occasions had a major impact on contemporary African art movements. Read More...
