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| Ibrahim El-Salahi, They Always Appear, 1964-65, oil on canvas, 18 x 12 inches. Image via iraaa.museum.hamptonu.edu. |
Ibrahim El-Salahi:
Selected Works, 1962-2010
May 1 – June 14, 2014
Opening reception: Thursday, May 1, 2014, 6 – 8PM
529 West 20th Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY
Edited from
skotogallery.com:
Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Selected Works 1962-2010 by Ibrahim El-Salahi, an exhibition of drawings
and paintings by the Sudanese-born artist. This is the artist’s second solo
show at the gallery and the first U.S. presentation of his work since his
highly acclaimed 2013 retrospective Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist at the Tate Modern in London which was
organized by the Museum for African Art, New York.
El-Salahi is celebrated as a pioneer modernist and one of the
most significant figures in African and Arab modernism. A leading light in the
Khartoum School, he has made significant contributions to the development of
post-colonial aesthetics and artistic ideology during the 1960s decade of
independence and liberation movements in Africa. His work offers an intensely
personal reflection of self, nurtured within the compass of individual and
collective history, and in the context of global transformations.
They Always Appear, a painting from 1964-65, is one of
several important works on view in this show. It is an outstanding canvas from El-Salahi’s early years of self-discovery and rigorous experimentation. It is a
deeply meditative image dense with infinite nuances that expertly addresses the
ambiguity between abstract shapes and imagery as well as the intriguing play
between formal intention and narrative potential. Imbued with remarkable
elegance and lyrical beauty, They Always
Appear captures with vividness the intensity of the creative energy that
informed El-Salahi’s declaration: “There is no painting without drawing and
there is no shape without line, in the end all images can be reduced to lines’
Ibrahim El-Salahi was born in Omdurman, Sudan in 1930. He
studied in Khartoum and then the Slade School of Art, London in the 1950s. His
work has been shown at venues such as PS1, New York; Tate Modern, London;
Sharjah Museum, UAE; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Haus der Kunst,
Munich. He is represented in numerous international private and public
collections including The Metropolitan Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art,
New York; Museum for Africa Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Iwalewa Haus, Bayreuth,
Germany; and National Gallery, Berlin. He is recipient of the Rockefeller
Foundation Fellowship, The Order of Knowledge, Art and Letters, Sudan and the
Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development Honorary Award. He lives and
works in Oxford, England.
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