![](data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1" height="1334px" width="2000px"></svg>)
‘Son of the old Moon-Mountains African! Chief of the Pyramid and Crocodile! We call thee fruitful, and that very while a desert fills our seeing’s inward span: Nurse of sward nations since the world began, Art thou so fruitful?’
F lowing northwards from Lake Victoria, the River Nile runs through the valleys of the Sudan and Egypt passing Nubia – the land of the ancient kingdoms of Kush – before spilling into the Mediterranean. A conduit for trade, it is also a place where different cultures coalesce.
It is the conjoining of these elements — African figurative, Islamic calligraphy, abstract, Nubian and western styles — that makes the art of the Sudan and Egypt so vital today, and underscores its importance in the canon of Contemporary African Art. Spontaneous and ever-changing, it has broken the historic African/Arab dichotomy, producing art of tremendous aesthetic power and great social consequence.
The relevance of these elements is evidenced in the heightened interest in the art by acclaimed artists: Hussein Shariffe, Fathi Afifi, Salah Elmur, Khaled Hafez and Mohamed Abdalla Otaybi.
The great-grandson of the Mahdi of Sudan, the late Hussein Shariffe was a painter and filmmaker. Prior to joining the Slade School of Fine Art, Shariffe studied modern history at the University of Cambridge. After completing his studies, he left the United Kingdom to teach at the renowned Khartoum College of Fine and Applied Arts. The artist was awarded the John Moores Painting Prize for young artists and had his first solo presentation in London at Gallery One, Mayfair in 1958. In Songlines for Bruce Chatwin, 1990-92 –the artist pays tribute to his friend, Charles Bruce Chatwin, an English travel writer, novelist and journalist who visited Sudan in 1965.
Mohamed Otaybi Abdalla, a graduate from the Khartoum College of Fine and Applied Arts, is considered one of the most prominent modernist Sudanese artists. His art combines natural forms, calligraphy and geometrical shapes.
Reclining Woman 2015 depicts a lady reclining with a crescent moon above in the sky and a dove by her head – a symbol of spirituality, the dove of the soul.
In Salah Elmur’s Bint El-Sudan, we see a female figure, possibly the Nubian Kandake (Queen) Shanakdakhete, standing on top of the Pyramids of Meroë, the capital of the Kingdom of Kush of ancient Nubia. Shanakdakhete was the earliest female monarch.
The Artichoke Holders, by Elmur – previously exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery – captures two male figures holding artichokes tightly to themselves, demonstrating a dual identity. The two characters are distinctly Sudanese, while the artichoke, as depicted in the painting, only grow in Egypt.
Cairo-based artist Fathi Afifi has occupied himself since the 1960s with the theme of factories and the worker. Factory machines in Grey, 2016, illustrates the production line in large repetitive arrangements and is contrasted by smaller individuals that represent factory workers. A former machine-operator himself, Afifi said: ‘Humans created the machines to serve – yet it is the machines that are the immortals and we are to serve them’.
The above painting by Khaled Hafez is part of the artist's series Once upon a Time in Eden, 2017. Here, Hafez alludes to the ancient gods of Egypt morphing with today’s superheroes, revealing that the process of assimilation and confluence that began two hundred years ago continues to the present day.
