We are extremely proud to have entered into a multi-year sponsorship with the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair’s sculpture commission. This unique monumental sculpture commission is focused on supporting the production, exhibition, and permanent display of a large-scale sculpture by an artist originally from the African continent. The commission offers the unique setting of Somerset House to unveil the work to an audience of thousands of collectors and art lovers in London before making the journey across the Mediterranean, to the ancient village of Utique Impact Place in Tunisia. In its first year, the KLF Sculpture Commission @ 1-54 London celebrated the great Arab modernist, Ibrahim El Salahi (Sudan) with his monumental sculpture "Meditation Tree".
Touria El Glaoui with Ibrahim El-Salahi and Lina Lazaar, at 1-54 London 2018 © Katrina Sorrentino
About the artist
El-Salahi grew up in Omdurman, Sudan and studied at the Slade School in London. On his return to Sudan in 1957, he established a new visual vocabulary, which arose from his own pioneering integration of Sudanese, Islamic, African, Arab and Western artistic traditions. In 2013 Ibrahim El-Salahi became the first artist of African Birth to be given a retrospective at Tate Modern.