![]() ![]() Ishag’s figures never developed much, and retain an often somewhat cartoonish expressionism, although there is great tenderness in both an early drawing of naked dancing legs, and in a vision of a much older woman in her 2017 painting Lady Grown in a Tree. The two might appear irreconcilable, but in both artists’ work there is a sense of the malleability of the human body, and how we are shaped by forces we can’t control. ![]() The Serpentine’s retrospective takes us, not always chronologically, from early drawings made at art school in Sudan to her time in London, where she was influenced both by William Blake and Francis Bacon. Central to Ishag’s work is the place of women, who continue to be her major subject. The painting refers to the massacre of peaceful protesters, raped, shot and drowned in Khartoum in 2019. In Blues for the Martyrs she depicts clusters of round faces floating in bubbles amid a tracery of waving, leafy stems, rather like fish eggs among waterweeds, against a blue watery background. She has also spent periods in self-imposed exile because of the turbulent political situation in her country, but she has never stopped painting. Now 83, the painter also studied in London in the late 1960s, at the Royal College of Art, before returning to Khartoum, where she became head of painting at the art school, and an inspiration to generations of students. There is in Ishag’s art a mixture of the folkloric and the religious, the Christian and Islamic, the pagan and secular, all reflecting the convergence of different traditions and beliefs in her native Sudan. Past and present collide, and Ishag’s paintings at the Serpentine are filled with such memories and stories, many of which remain unexplained and inaccessible. Ishag’s paintings often go back to the stories that her grandmothers told. Oblique politics … Blues for the Martyrs, 2022. Maybe it has been told for generations, centuries, millennia. This how rumours are spread, and this one has been doing the rounds now for a lifetime. I only know about this small detail because the artist told the curator, and the curator told me. Look closely and all you see are a homely couple seated to either side of a tree-trunk. ![]() There was, apparently, one corner of the neighbourhood that the local children, and doubtless some adults too, were afraid of: the house of a man who was possessed by a Djinn or spirit. The Sudanese painter was, I think, also telling herself a story, and as much as she was drawing with a brush she was also remembering, and making things up as she went along, losing and re-finding herself along the paths her mind took. A lovely, fanciful painting, Bait al-Mal is a memory map as much as it is a description of a place. All around the edge of the painting are simplified trees, and it is their tangle of spreading roots that provide the skein of these relationships. We’ll never get to the end of them in these looping, bifurcating and fracturing lines. Instead of streets and corners, we trace winding, branching webs of family and friendships and associations. This large, mostly dusky canvas presents us with clusters of figures in a kind of diagram of their connections and interrelatedness. I n her painting Bait al-Mal, Kamala Ibrahim Ishag presents us with the neighbourhood in Khartoum where she grew up during the 1940s and 50s. ![]()
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