Footnotes

Provenance
Collection of Mr and Mrs Oscar Edwards, Australia;
A private collection.

Ibrahim El-Salahi is perhaps Sudan's most celebrated living artist. A career spanning five decades, his work was brought to international attention when a major retrospective of his work was held at London's Tate Modern in 2013. The exhibition showcased the breadth of Salahi's oeuvre and explored his key themes: the legacy of colonialism, the creative influence of faith, and his own hybrid identity.

Created at a time when El-Salahi was pronouncing himself as an artist, a concurrent stylistic theme can be seen in this work that emerged in the late 1950s and 60s. The inspiration of these figurative depictions can be concluded as stemming from different aspects of the artist's life. Intuitive in his artistic approach, El-Salahi's process in depicting these faces is a response to his inner self, isolated from the outside world. In his art human existence is linked to a world of dreams and mediations which bore a heavy and ever-present presence within his work. The dense imagery threatens to burst out from the confines of the page, the dynamic lines pulse with energy and life. As an older man, El-Salahi reflected on these early drawings:

"It was almost like I had a fever and I had so many ideas coming through me and I had to put them through. So the picture plane was covered, with objects, with figures, with shapes, near and far, big and small, it was packed...there was no space - you cannot travel through it easily..." (El-Salahi, interview with Sarah Adams in April, 2002)

Towards the top of the work emerges from the black ink, the word 'Lights' in Arabic. Mobilising text as an aesthetic tool, this word assists the nature of the present work given its black background for the fine illustrations to appear, creating a sense of light and dark. As calligraphy bore a strong position in many of the artist's most successful works, the present work can act as a striking example of El-Salahi's incorporation of his Sudanese heritage with his Western artistic training.

The Oscar Edwards collection was significantly unusual given its location in Australia. Indeed Mr and Mrs Edwards typically collected non-Australian Art in the 1950s and 60s after selling their predominantly Australian art collection in the 1930s and 40s. This rejection of a parochialistic approach to collecting enabled the couple to enrich their collection, focussing their attention more towards smaller works by great artist's, finding them more aesthetically significant and appealing than a major work by a smaller artist. It was towards the end of the 1950s and early 60s that Ibrahim El-Salahi began to define his original style, a style that would harness his success. In 1962, El-Salahi received a UNESCO Fine Arts Fellowship to study abroad in the USA. In 1964 he would return to travel throughout the Americas and was exposed to influential members of the art world such as Alfred Baar Jr, director of the MOMA. By 1969, El-Salahi had acted as the chief Sudanese representative for the first World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, was a member of the Committee at the UNESCO Paris headquarters for the study of Arab culture, participated in the Contemporary African Art exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre in London, and was a member of the Sudan Cultural delegation.

Despite these monumental achievements, interestingly, the artist and activist noted of the Camden Arts Centre exhibition "it was exciting, but also frustrating, because there was little response from the rest of the world, or even Africa itself." (Ibrahim El-Salahi in Mark Hudson, 'Ibrahim El-Salahi: from Sudanese prison to Tate Modern show', The Guardian, (3 July 2013)). Therefore, given the provenance of the present work and indeed his far reach to international collectors, the present work is a colossal demonstration El-Salahi's global reception.

Bibliography
Lena Fritsch, Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Sudanese Artist in Oxford (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2018)