Ibrahim El-Salahi

Ibrahim El-Salahi was born in Omdurman, Sudan, where his father taught at a Quranic school and children learned to write on wooden boards. He studied art in Khartoum and then at the Slade in London in the mid-1950s, and came home in 1957 to teach. His first exhibition there of European-style portraits and landscapes was met with polite silence; hardly anyone came. He realised he was speaking a borrowed language.

So he began to look at what was around him: the shapes of Arabic letters, Islamic decoration, African masks and the muted colours of the Sudanese earth. Out of this came a spare, calligraphic style that helped define what became known as the Khartoum School and made him one of the first African modernists to be taken seriously abroad.

He also worked for the state, rising to become an under-secretary in the Ministry of Culture. In 1975 he was arrested, falsely accused of involvement in a coup attempt and held for more than six months in Kober prison without charge or trial. Drawing materials were forbidden, so he drew on scraps of paper with whatever he could find, burying the results in the sand in the yard. He left Sudan in 1977 and has never lived there again, settling in Qatar and then in Oxford.

In 2013 Tate Modern gave him a full retrospective, the first it had ever given to an African artist. He was 82, and still painting.