Independent New York

Ibrahim El-Salahi (b. 1930, Sudan) is one of the most important living African artists. A key figure in the development of African Modernism, he grew up in Omdurman, Sudan and studied at the Slade School in London. On his return to Sudan in 1957, he established a new visual vocabulary which arose from his pioneering integration of Sudanese, Islamic, African, Arab and Western artistic traditions. Since 2016, Sudanese Oxford-based artist Ibrahim El-Salahi has created an extraordinary body of work from the comfort of an armchair, refusing to let physical restriction limit his ambition. He has produced around 200 tiny, but incredible drawings in pen and ink created on the inside cardboard of his medicine packets and on the backs of envelopes after consuming their contents. The ‘Godfather of African Modernism’ says the act of creating these drawings is the only time he really has relief from the pain he experiences from his chronic sciatica and Parkinson’s pain. These were drawings in their own right, but they were also seeds for a very ambitious project. El-Salahi wanted to make larger-scale work despite his physical constraints and achieved this by using these drawings as a nucleus from which to create large, unique mono-print paintings transferred by screen from the drawings.

Jordy Kerwick (b. 1982, Melbourne, Australia) lives and works in Albi, France. He is self taught, taking up painting in 2016, and has exhibited extensively internationally, including most recently at the Thyssen Museum, Madrid. His paintings and sculptures are held in numerous public and private collections. At once historic and compellingly naïve in their mining of archetypes and ancestral memories, Kerwick's works are populated by quasi-mythical creatures. Wolves, tigers, cobras, bears, horses, unicorns, and humans all figure, often presenting as zoomorphic hybrids. Such forms lie deep in our collective consciousness, being the subject of some of the earliest cave paintings, dating from the Palaeolithic era. The childlike rendering of these story patterns is significant to Kerwick’s process, as he seeks to unlearn the conventional constraints of both adulthood and the art world. Merging mythical creatures with human forms, flowers and landscapes, Kerwick’s imaginative work challenges the normal constraints of both adulthood and the art world.