Ibrahim El Salahi: A Visionary Modernist is the first museum retrospective of Ibrahim El Salahi, whose powerful paintings reflect a life of struggle, migration, contemplation, and prayer. Revered throughout Africa and the Middle East, El Salahi has inspired generations of artists with his meditative approach to imagery.  This exhibition traces El Salahi’s journey from Sudan, his self-imposed exile in the United Kingdom and Qatar, and later time in the United States. Spanning nearly five decades and several continents, El Salahi’s critically accomplished painting practice has been guided by his deep devotion to, and exploration of, Islamic faith.

El Salahi’s prolific career is one of constant experimentation with different techniques, symbolic languages, and visions. His diverse body of work is not bound within one style nor is it constrained by the early parameters of Sudanese aesthetic concerns; his paintings combine a critical understanding of western art principles with an original visual sophistication in their reference to Sudanese and Islamic art forms. Yet his trademark linear style remains a preeminent unifying device expressing the artist’s intuitive merging of Islamic spirituality with critical social consciousness.

El Salahi pioneered the “Khartoum School” style of painting described by the artist as “the abstract symbolic representational potential of the Arabic letter, realized by distinct Sudanese handwriting and decorated by African ornamentations.”  This approach of reconciling Modernism with Arab-African heritage    illustrates an authentically African Modernism independent of Western inspiration.

Ibrahim El Salahi: A Visionary Modernist begins with exceptional examples of his early work, made when he was a student at the Slade School in London, including an important El Salahi painting from 1965 entitled A Vision of the Tomb, which has been gifted to the Museum for African Art by the JP Morgan Chase Foundation. The exhibition continues with pieces made in New York and Sudan from the early 1960s, and follows with a selection of paintings and drawings conceived while the artist lived in Qatar in the mid-1970s. The final section features work produced during El Salahi’s relocation to Oxford, England in the 1980s and 1990s, along with his recent series made in New York in 2005. A stunning three-panel painting commissioned by the  Museum of African Art is a closing highlight of this exceptional exhibition.

Guest curated by Salah M. Hassan, Professor and Director of the Africana Studies and Research Center and Professor of African and African Diaspora Art History and Visual Culture at Cornell University, this exhibition is set to open in the Middle East and travel to Europe before it arrives at the Museum for African Art in New York City. 

Accompanying the exhibition is a scholarly monograph published in conjunction with the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) in London. The publication includes contributions from Editor Salah Hassan, Sarah Adams, Iftikhar Dadi, Cheryl Finley, Hassan Musa, and Chika Okeke-Agulu, as well as an illustrated chronology by Ibrahim El Salahi. Also included is a text by Tayeb Salih, one of the most important Arabic authors of the 20th century, as well as interviews with El Salahi by Uli Beier and Fathi Mohammed Osman.

Ibrahim El Salahi: A Visionary Modernist is available for travel. For more information please e-mail travellingexhibitions@africanart.org