Salah Elmur: Studio Kamal: Circle Art Gallery

SALAH ELMUR - Sudanese, b. 1966

Salah Elmur originally studied Graphic Design at the College of Fine and Applied Art, Sudan University, Khartoum. With a career spanning three decades, Elmur has participated in group and solo exhibitions in East Africa, the Middle East, and Europe and America 1985. Elmur has also published 12 children’s books, and is a successful filmmaker, directing six short documentaries and fantasy films which have been shown at international film festivals In February 2018, the Sharjah Art Museum in the UAE held Fragrances of the Forest and Photos, a retrospective of Elmur’s work. Most recently, Elmur’s work was featured Forests and Spirits, an exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London alongside two luminaries of Sudanese modernism, Kamala Ishaq and Ibrahim El Salahi. His work is collected widely and is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL) in Marrakech.

Salah Elmur’s work reflects a fertile visual vocabulary that draws on his observations of life, often returning to childhood and youth for the scenes, situations, and impressions that he depicts in his work. Heavy symbolism, a tendency towards vivid color combinations, and distortion of natural figures and proportion are some of the markers of Elmur’s painting. The resulting, somewhat surreal compositions, usually portraits, are framed in a virtual studio, an ongoing project of the artist, referencing a tradition of studio portraiture to which he was exposed as a child – his grandfather ran Studio Kamal, a photo studio in Khartoum. Certain hallmarks of this tradition – painted backdrops, curtains on either side of the frame, checked floor pattern - reference that very studio, and many others like it. The results are paintings that offer tender, poetic snapshots of various moments of human life.