El Anatsui

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa
IN WOOD AND METAL SCULPTURES, ceramics, paintings, prints, and drawings
created over the past five decades, El Anatsui (b. 1944, Ghana) tells his
personal story alongside local and global narratives. Today an internationally
renowned artist, he lives and works in Nigeria and continues to use the
simplest materials to create monumental sculptures. El Anatsui: When I Last
Wrote to You about Africa, the artist’s first retrospective, surveys his ongoing
practice of juxtaposing color, form, and pattern to evoke major themes in
African and world history.
Anatsui, best known for his shimmering metal sculptures made from
thousands of West African liquor bottle tops, has also worked in a variety of
other mediums, some of them long-established and some less conventional.
He has often used materials from his immediate surroundings in his
sculptures—in the 1970s he worked with wood trays like the ones sold in
the market stalls of Ghana, in the 1980s sculpting with clay pots and yam
pounders, from the 1990s onward fashioning metal bottle tops and milk-tin
lids—and, by doing so, infusing his art with symbols and myth. Many of his
large compositions consist of multiple parts. Anatsui
encourages diverse readings by rearranging sections of
scorched wood slats or linked aluminum caps, seeing
such movement as part of his nomadic aesthetic.
Anatsui’s art, like his poetic titles, can be simultaneously
diminutive and monumental, delicate and violent,
whimsical and serious. There is no one single trajectory,
no specific path to take through history. El Anatsui asks
us to make connections between our knowledge and
his message, our environments and his materials, and
most of all, between our lives and his art.
El Anatsui carving Erosion with a chainsaw
at an Earth Summit workshop in Manaus,
Brazil, 1992. The finished work was displayed
in the exhibition Arte Amazonas at
the Modern Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro.
ABOUT THIS EXHIBITION 3