Vigo Gallery
7-8 Masons Yard London SW1Y 6BU
In Black and White Vigo presents 91-year-old Ibrahim El-Salahi’s pen and ink works on paper made from 2012 to 2013. These previously unseen works were completed in the lead up to his solo show at Tate Modern in 2013, where he became the first artist of African birth to be honoured with a Solo Retrospective. The Notebook containing all these drawings was exhibited but only with one page open, the remaining contents not revealed until now. Other complete notebooks and diaries are now in the collections of MOMA, The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Sharjah Art Foundation and Modern Forms.
These works show the Godfather of African Art at his best with a confidence of line reflecting over seventy years of creating his surreal multilayered visions.
Born in Sudan in 1930, Ibrahim El-Salahi is one of the most important living African artists and 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 own pioneering integration of Sudanese, Islamic, African, Arab and Western artistic traditions.
2022 is an exciting year for the now Oxford based El-Salahi. The artist was selected to participate with 99 drawings in the current 2022 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams curated by Cecilia Alemani. Alongside the exhibition at Masons Yard, London, Vigo will show Ibrahim El-Salahi 'Pain Relief' at Wellington Arch in the Quadriga Galleries. His Pain Relief drawings will then be the subject of a solo exhibition at The Norwegian Drawing Association - Tegnerforbundet which will travel in an expanded format to The Drawing Centre in New York in October. The Pain Relief canvases relating to these drawings were recently the subject of a solo exhibition at Hastings Contemporary (Formally the Jerwood Gallery). In a busy year the 91 year old legend will also participate in upcoming group exhibitions at the Chrysler Museum of Art (October), and the Fisk University Galleries (October).
