Footnotes

Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist;
A private collection;
Acquired at Sotheby's, Modern and Contemporary African Art Sale, London, 2021, Lot 69;
A private collection.

Exhibited
Sharjah, Sharjah Art Museum, Salah Elmur Fragrances of the Forest and Photos, (28 February-2 June 2018);
London, Saatchi Gallery, Forests and Spirits Figurative Art from the Khartoum School, (24 September-25 November 2018)

Literature
Sharjah Art Museum, Salah Elmur Fragrances of the Forest and Photos, (2018), p. 56. (illustrated)
Saatchi Gallery, Forests and Spirits Figurative Art from the Khartoum School, (2018), (illustrated)

Growing up in a newly independent Sudan, Salah Elmur's artistic expression was catalysed by a cultural richness and diverse society. This enabled him to formulate a visual language resonating with Sudan's unique identity. It is this ethos of collective and individual investigations into one's own identity that is central to the artist's work.

Sudan's independence spawned a modernist movement in the 1960s when Elmur was born. By the time Elmur had graduated from his graphic design degree at the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum, he had become firmly rooted in the Khartoum School modernist movement alongside renowned artists such as Ibrahim El-Salahi and Kamala Ishaq. Today, Elmur's accomplished practise extends to painting, illustration, photography, and film. His work is held in several prominent museum collections including The Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden, Marrakech, and the Sharjah Art Museum in the UAE where he held a major retrospective in June 2018, Fragrances of the Forest and Photos, where the present work was exhibited. The White Shoes then travelled to London where it was again exhibited at Saatchi Gallery in September 2018 in Forests and Spirits: Figurative art from the Khartoum School.

This work's impressive exhibition history is a testament to its prestigious positioning in the artist's oeuvre. Part of the Kamal Photography series, Elmur uses works such as The White Shoes to celebrate his father and grandfather's photography studio work. In the same way as his relatives once did, Elmur uses his work to document the lives of the community he grew up surrounded by in Khartoum, using his childhood memories rather than a camera to capture the characters, colours, scenery, and motifs of his past to defy the passage of time.

Characterised by the emphasis on the subject's relationship to features within his paintings, less regard is given to capturing naturalistic likenesses. Distorted and out of proportion, his subjects are often accompanied by objects of affection, whether animals, plants, or family members. Ambiguous to a degree as to the nature or level of relevance and intimacy these objects or figures have to the central figures, Elmur leaves space for the viewer to reflect on their own relationships and their possessions. In The White Shoes, a young girl gazes beyond us and is accompanied by a tree and a dog in a composition reminiscent of a carefully orchestrated photograph. The brightness of the background is countered by the striking white shoes of which this painting gives its namesake. The tree motif, as is often used by the artist, was inspired by the Sunut Forest where the White and Blue Nile meet in the centre of Khartoum, a focal point of celebration for the community.