His paintings are filled with elongated figures, crescent shapes, masks and flowing lines that recall Arabic letters. Some are in bold earth colours, others in black and white ink. They feel at once African, Arab and modern. Ibrahim El-Salahi, born in Sudan in 1930, spent decades developing a visual language that drew on his country’s many cultural roots. He became one of the most important figures in African modern art and, late in life, received the international recognition his work deserved.
Early life and the Khartoum School
El-Salahi was born in Omdurman, Sudan. His father ran a Quranic school, and the young Ibrahim learned Arabic calligraphy early. He studied art in Khartoum and later at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the 1950s. On returning to Sudan, he felt his European-style work did not connect with local audiences. He began incorporating Arabic calligraphy and African forms into his art.
El-Salahi was a founder of the Khartoum School, a movement of Sudanese artists who sought a modern art rooted in Sudan’s Arab and African heritage.
Calligraphy, prison and exile
He used Arabic letters as shapes and patterns rather than readable text, transforming them into figures and abstract forms. In 1975, while working in government, he was imprisoned without trial for several months. He made drawings secretly during his detention. After his release, he lived abroad, in Qatar and later in Oxford, England. In 2013, Tate Modern in London held a major retrospective of his work, a landmark show for African modernism that introduced him to a wide public.
His work is in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Later work and identity
In later years he made small drawings, sometimes on pill packets and scraps of paper, as he managed chronic pain. He influenced generations of artists in Sudan and across Africa. El-Salahi is regarded as one of the founders of African modernism. His work reflected Sudan’s position between the Arab world and sub-Saharan Africa, a meeting of cultures that shaped his art throughout his career.
Ibrahim El-Salahi learned to write Arabic letters as a child in his father’s school. He spent the rest of his life turning those letters into art that no one needed to read to understand.
