Ibrahim El-Salahi

Biography

In Kober prison in Khartoum drawing was forbidden: a pencil or a scrap of paper found on you meant fifteen days in solitary. Ibrahim El-Salahi got hold of a pencil all the same. Food was handed out to the prisoners in brown paper bags; he tore them into pieces and, during the twenty-five minutes of daily exercise, sketched ideas for large paintings. He secretly buried the little drawings in the sand. When he was released on 16 March 1976 he did not take a single one with him; they all stayed in the ground.

He had been put in prison in 1975 and spent six months and eight days there without trial, accused of involvement in an anti-government plot. In the same months many intellectuals and some members of the Sudanese Communist Party were behind bars. The head of the security service later told him that, but for Bona Malwal, he would not have been let out.

Before his arrest he had had an entirely official career. In 1969–1972 El-Salahi served as assistant cultural attaché at the Sudanese embassy in London, then came back as director of culture in the government of Jaafar Nimeiry, and until September 1975 he was deputy minister of culture and information.

He was born on 5 September 1930 in El Abbasiya, a district of Omdurman, into a Muslim family. His father ran a Quranic school, and there the boy learned to read, to write and to form Arabic letters; calligraphy later became the basis of his painting. In 1949–1950 he studied fine art at the School of Design of Gordon Memorial College, the future University of Khartoum. In 1954–1957 he studied in London on a scholarship, at the Slade School of Fine Art, and absorbed there European modernism with its freedom of gesture.

Back in Sudan, he held an exhibition in Khartoum of still lifes, portraits and nudes. As he recalled in 2013, people came to the opening for the soft drinks, and after that nobody came. For two years he did not know what to do next. Then he began writing small Arabic inscriptions in the corners of his paintings, like postage stamps, and viewers began to come closer. He let the words spread across the whole canvas, and then began taking the letters themselves apart to understand what gives them meaning. Out of what had been abstract signs, in his words, came forms of animals, people and plants, and he believes that this was when he started working seriously. The path to the letters also ran, incidentally, through the Coptic manuscripts he studied. In this way his European training merged with Sudanese themes, and the result was something like an African surrealism. Later the tendency in which Arabic calligraphy enters modernist painting would be called hurufiyya.

His palette in these years is muted: black, white, burnt sienna, yellow ochre. He explained that these were the colours of the earth and of the skin of the people in his part of Sudan. In “Vision of the Tomb” (1965) indistinct forms surface from a dusky ground; in “The Last Sound” (1964) and “Allah and the Wall of Confrontation” (1968) a crescent shape appears. He always considered line the main thing: there is no painting without drawing, he says, and every image comes down in the end to lines. His black-and-white illustrations appear in editions of Tayeb Salih’s novels “The Wedding of Zein” (1967) and “The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid” (1969).

Together with Osman Waqialla, Ahmed Mohammed Shibrain and Tag el-Sir Ahmed, El-Salahi founded the Khartoum School of modern art. Poets and prose writers of the so-called “Desert School” worked alongside them, and they all had a common aim: a modern Sudanese aesthetic that would not rest on Western models alone. In 1962 he went to the United States on a UNESCO fellowship and from there travelled to South America; in 1964–1965 he worked in America again with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation. In the early 1960s he made a short visit to Nigeria, to the Mbari Club in Ibadan, and recalled that the trip opened him up to influences in both directions. In 1966 he led the Sudanese delegation to the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, and in 1969 he was a member of the delegation to the first Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers.

Two years after his release he left Sudan. The late 1970s and early 1980s he spent in Doha, where he worked mainly in black-and-white drawing. Many of his admirers did not know he was living in Qatar, and he himself called that remoteness a relief: he could experiment more. I think the austerity of the Doha drawings grew out of precisely this freedom. Later El-Salahi settled in Oxford. The late works are more meditative and warmer in colour, with figures assembled from geometric forms.

In 2001 he received the Dutch Prince Claus Award. In the summer of 2013 Tate Modern in London showed his retrospective of a hundred works, the first time it had devoted such an exhibition to an African artist. In 2016–2017 his works held a prominent place in the exhibition on the Khartoum School at the Sharjah Art Foundation, and in 2018 the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford showed his series “Trees”, whose main motif is the haraz acacia of the Nile valley, for the artist a symbol of the Sudanese character. The same year his “Prison Notebook” was published. Already past ninety, he made sculptures resembling these trees for Regent’s Park in London, and in October 2022 his drawings on scraps of paper, envelopes and medicine packets were shown in New York. El-Salahi’s works are held by Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Sharjah Art Foundation.