In recent years, the now 92-year-old artist Ibrahim El-Salahi has been working on a new series of works: his Pain Relief Drawings, with which he distracts himself from his chronic pain. 100 of them can be seen from 7 October in the exhibition of the same name at the Drawing Center in New York.
They are on scraps of paper, envelopes, medical packaging or the labels of pill bottles: Ibrahim El-Salahi's latest series of works, Pain Relief, are experimental drawings that provide distraction from his chronic pain. The series currently consists of almost 300 works, most of which were created during the last two and a half years of the pandemic. 100 selected works will be on display at the Drawing Center in New York from 7 October, providing up-to-date insights into El-Salahi's artistic activity. Ibrahim El-Salahi: Pain Relief Drawings runs until 15 January 2023.
El-Salahi is one of the best-known African artists of the 20th century. Born in Sudan in 1930, he was a co-founder of the Khartoum School and had a decisive influence on modern African and Arab painting from the 1950s onwards. El-Salahi combined surrealist and geometric abstract elements with Arabic calligraphy to create a unique visual language. El-Salahi has lived in England since the late 1970s. In 2013, the Tate organised a major exhibition of his works − it was its first retrospective of a contemporary African artist.
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