Alphabet No. 1,

1960

Alphabet No. 1 documents El-Salahi’s early experiments with what he terms a “pictorial alphabet.” In this painting, the artist disassembled Arabic script letters and reconstituted their rhythmic forms into a new visual language. The negative space between letters revealed a world of imagery to El-Salahi. He wrote, “In place of those broken-up letters, I discovered animal and plant forms, sounds, human images, and what looked like skeletons with masked faces.” The motifs that appear here—especially the skeletal figure with an Islamic prayer board for a torso and the crescents of minarets—resonated with nationalist audiences in Sudan, a predominantly Muslim nation that gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1956.