Vigo Gallery presents Ibrahim El-Salahi: The Early Years, 1950–1963, an exhibition bringing together paintings and works on paper spanning a crucial period in the development of one of the foundational figures of African and Arabic modernism. Retained within the family collection, these works remained largely untouched and, in most cases, unframed. They have never previously been exhibited or offered for sale, although several were reproduced in the Tate Modern exhibition catalogue for historical reference.
Paintings from this period in El-Salahi’s career are exceptionally rare. It is rarer still for a concentrated group with a family provenance to be seen together outside a major institutional retrospective.
The Early Years follows El-Salahi’s journey from his beginnings as a young painter in Khartoum to his arrival at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1954, and through the period following his return to newly independent Sudan in 1957. It is the story of an artist absorbing, testing, rejecting and transforming ideas.
Born in Omdurman in 1930, El-Salahi grew up in a deeply religious household.