El-Salahi was born on September 5, 1930, in Omdurman, Sudan. Born to an Islamic teacher in Sudan's second city, Omdurman, his first foray into art was decorating the writing slates at his father's Qur'anic school. He began art studies at Khartoum's Gordon Memorial College and won a scholarship to London's Slade art school in 1954, he was well-versed in figure-drawing, perspective and the western view of art history. El-Salahi had little concept of himself as an African artist, though. He thoroughly enjoyed London and found it fascinating, discovering Cézanne, Giotto and other European artists.
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El-Salah: Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams
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In the post-Slade period he moves from classical modernism towards a pioneering integration of African, Islamic, and Western perspectives. Self-realisation came when he returned to Sudan in 1957. Following a few unpopular exhibitions, he was "completely stuck for two years. He began looking for what was missing – what would allow his paintings to resonate with the people around him. What caught his eye were Islamic calligraphy and decorative patterns. They were everywhere: in houses, offices and shops. "I started to write small Arabic inscriptions in the corners of my paintings, almost like postage stamps," he recalls, "and people started to come towards me. I spread the words over the canvas, and they came a bit closer. Then I began to break down the letters to find what gave them meaning, and a Pandora's box opened. Animal forms, human forms and plant forms began to emerge from these once-abstract symbols. That was when I really started working. Images just came, as though I was doing it with a spirit I didn't know I had."
Sudan in the 1970s and El-Salahi, the country's undersecretary for culture, found himself imprisoned without trial. Although on his release he wanted to see the downfall of the system that imprisoned him, he accepted an offer in 1977 to leave Sudan and set up a culture ministry in Qatar where he spent 21 years. Not that you’ll find many overtly political statements in this five-decade retrospective. Rather, El-Salahi’s agenda is primarily aesthetic, an attempt to fuse Western and Arabic forms and traditions. What also makes him such an interesting artist is the sense of tension in his work between an intellect that seeks purity of expression and an imagination which wants to free itself from constraint. One commentator was recently tempted to say that there is something very Islamic in this combination of the rigours of outward form and the intensity of inner yearning. El-Salahi does not seem to label himself as a Muslim Artist and for sure his work is less likely to appeal to those with a traditional view of what Muslim Art. However, his journey from childhood African madrassa, through post-modern Europe, to settle in a place he can call home, is a journey that many Muslims in the West will relate to. His art can be seen as signposts of the journey he has made, and is still on, and it is the journey itself that resonates with not only Islamic and Sufi symbolism but are universal. Throughout his career, El-Salahi has incorporated into his pictures the crescent and moon of Muslim iconography along with the bird that is so often the symbol of hope and freedom in its tales.
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Vision of the Tomb (1965), by Ibrahim el-Salahi
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Now, at 80, having and lived quietly in Britain for years with his wife Katherine, El-Salahi has come a long way since he drew on scraps while a political prisoner and is the first African artist to get a Tate Modern retrospective. "To come in from the cold after all this time is a wonderful thing," he says from his kitchen in Oxford. El-Salahi cuts an affable, avuncular figure, quiet but articulate. El-Salahi's evocative paintings, a kind of African surrealism, are rooted in both the Arab and African worlds. But more than that, his story embodies the journey of a 20th-century African Muslim artist.
