Generous support for Ibrahim El-Salahi: Pain Relief Drawings is provided by the Robert Lehman Foundation and Isabel Stainow Wilcox. Additional support is provided by Vigo Gallery and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn.
Born in 1930 in Omdurman, Sudan, Ibrahim El-Salahi is one of the most significant artists in African and Arab modernism. Featuring over a hundred drawings from El-Salahi’s latest series, titled Pain Relief, this exhibition will mark the first museum presentation of the artist’s drawings since his 2013 retrospective at Tate Modern. Drafted on the back of medicine packets, pill bottle labels, envelopes, and scraps of paper, El-Salahi’s intricate pen and ink Pain Relief drawings serve as a form of respite for the 92-year-old artist, who finds diversion from his chronic pain through his daily drawing practice.
A British citizen for decades, El-Salahi’s drawings are deeply connected to postwar European modernism, but also are profoundly embedded in a tradition of African and Islamic art history. After studying at the Slade School of Art in London, El-Salahi returned to Khartoum in the late 1950s to become a founding member of the celebrated Khartoum School, a bellwether group of artists that represented the flowering of modernism in the Islamic world. Inspired by Arabic calligraphy, as well as Surrealist figuration and geometric abstraction, El-Salahi created a distinctive visual language that he expresses most prolifically in drawing.
Organized by Laura Hoptman, Executive Director