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SURF THE WORLD ARTS NETWORK
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El Anatsui - International African Artist
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El Anatsui is an internationally recognized contemporary West African artist, born in Ghana but working most of his life in Nigeria. His latest work is a series of metal sculptures made from found scraps—food tins, aluminum roofing, bottle caps, etc. – designed to be a metaphorical commentary on modern consumerism. The works are aesthetically resonant with African assemblages found in shrines but also with African urban landscapes, using precarious piles of imported goods from the markets to create makeshift structures. His freestanding tropical wood pieces are often accented with paints and scarred with flames, at once fresh yet duly informed by ancient wisdoms. El Anatsui’s long quest for a perfectly adapted language was resolved when he discovered the aesthetic and calligraphic resources of the chain-saw. These new approaches, fresh ways of phrasing old statements and the combining of old woodworking traditions with contemporary power tools reflects the theme of destruction and reconstitution and represent the changes experienced in Africa under colonialism and the following independence.
On his latest exhibition: GAWU
"'Ga' contains allusions to many things including metal, and 'Wu' references a fashioned cloak. The word encapsulates the medium, process and the format of the works, and I think it is appropriate for a show in which I am for the first time featuring works all in metal, sewn into extensive sheets."
- El Anatsui, September 2003
This exhibit was first seen in the United States at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art August through December 2005.
NOTE: More Links at the bottom of this page.....
El Anatsui : Fading cloth Artist's statement on materials and process
About six years ago I found a big bag of liquor bottle tops apparently thrown away in the bush. At the time I was searching for a pot monument (pillars of stacked pots, each of which represents a bereavement in the village) that I had seen decades before in that locality. I kept the bottle caps in the studio for several months until the idea eventually came to me that by stitching them together I could get them to articulate some statement. When the process of stitching got underway, I discovered that the result resembled a real fabric cloth. Incidentally too, the colours of the caps seemed to replicate those of traditional kente cloths. In effect the process was subverting the stereotype of metal as a stiff, rigid medium and rather showing it as a soft, pliable, almost sensuous material capable of attaining immense dimensions and being adapted to specific spaces. To me, the bottle tops encapsulate the essence of the alcoholic drinks which were brought to Africa by Europeans as trade items at the time of the earliest contact between the two peoples. Almost all the brands I use are locally distilled. I now source the caps from distillers around Nsukka, where I live and work. I don’t see what I do as recycling; I transform the caps into something else. If there is a direct link between the bottle tops and the fabric cloths, it is probably the fact that they all have names linked to events, people, historical or current issues. Take Ecomog gin: this refers to the regional military intervention force which brought the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia to an end. The brandy called Ebeano (meaning ‘where we are now’) references a popular electioneering slogan from the last political polls in the state in which I live. Similarly kente cloths are given names like takpekpe le Anloga (conference at Anloga) or can be named after a personality. Fading cloth is more of a formalistic name, with the full blooded reds at the top and bottom of the cloth yielding to creams and other pale colours in the centre. Flattening and stitching the caps is laborious and repetitive – a very different process to my earlier work using power tools on wood. I have several assistants working with me, and we start with strips and eventually assemble them into the final composite results. The process of stitching, especially the repetitive aspect, slows down action and I believe makes thinking deeper. It’s like the effect of a good mantra on the mind.
+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
« When I last wrote you about Africa / I used a letter-headed parchment paper / There were many blank slots in the letter... / I can now fill some of these slots because... / I can now mill some of these slots because... / I have grown older ».
What does El Anatsui want to say in these few lines ? What does he want to talk about, our history ? His story ? He admits that, at the time of writing, he had only just started to understand the Africa he refers to... His knowledge had previously been full of blank slots and holes, and it was up to him to fill them by going through the strongest initiatory experience there is : life.
He has gone through three or four stages in this quest for meaning. The first and founding stage was Anyako, in Ghana. The earthly centre of the sculptor's soul. Then came schooldays, and the rift that goes with them. There was History, the one taught at school, and there were his stories, the ones his father and the village chiefs had started to pass down to him. Then came university. Another rift. More initiation on the path of discovery. Other collages. Art school, specialising in sculpture. After graduating he experienced his first conscious aesthetic shock: the women at the market laid their wares out on carved wooden trays that were decorated using pyrography (poker-work). So the truth and meaning behind his research had always been there, right before his eyes.
In 1975, El Anatsui was hired at Nsukka University in Nigeria. Another stage, another move, another shock : the Akwanshi monoliths in the courtyard of the Lagos National Museum, the Nok terracotta and lastly, Igbo body painting, known as Uli. The last stage of this long quest, this search for a perfectly adapted language, came in 1980 in Cummington U.S.A., when he discovered the aesthetic and calligraphic resources of the chain-saw. Relieved of all these discoveries, adventures and journeys, El Anatsui could finally tell himself he had grown up.
El Anatsui is one of few African artists to have asserted their traditions and their relationship with sacredness. He has understood that there is no point in claiming to create a new world ex nihilo. In wanting to take God's place. - Simon Njami, Editor of Revue Noire, Paris
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El Anatsui Live ! Video of Installation at the Metropoliton Museum of Art
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El Anatsui installing "Between Earth and Heaven"
August 06, 2008
A behind-the-scenes view of the installation of Between Earth and Heaven, a monumental wall-mounted sculpture in recycled aluminum and copper wire, in the African galleries of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Curator Alisa LaGamma and artist El Anatsui talk about the installation and its significance, and the artist speaks about his process and influences when creating the piece.
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El Anatsui, a Sculptor Who Starts From Scrap
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Washington Post article featuring world famous African contemporary artist El Anatsui.
Excellent article by Barbara Pollack/ Edition Dated Sunday, March 23, 2008 (Page M06)
Many quote from El Anatsui and details about his recent success.,br>
Includes a SlideShow of his art.
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NYC MUSEUM FOR AFRICAN ART : El Anatsui Inagural Exhibition
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El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa is the first opportunity for audiences to see how the artist’s ideas have developed over three decades. The retrospective will cover El Anatsui’s career, ranging from his early work in Ghana making use of traditional symbols, to the driftwood pieces he created when in Denmark, to his sculpted chainsaw carvings. While many of El Anatsui’s works make use of found objects including bottle caps, milk tins, cassava graters, the artist states that his sculptures are not about recycling or salvaging, but rather about seeking meaning in the ways materials can be transformed to make statements about history, culture, and individual and collective memory.
A new film on El Anatsui directed by art historian and filmmaker Susan Vogel, with compelling footage of him at work in his studio in Nigeria, where he has taught art for three decades, as well as in Venice, Italy where he installed work at the 2007 Biennale, complements this stunning exhibition. A beautifully illustrated catalogue will include new essays written by the foremost scholars of contemporary art, and a long interview in which the artist provides new insight into his life and work. This major retrospective will be an inaugural exhibition in the Museum for African Art’s new building in Manhattan, scheduled to open in late 2009. It will then begin a tour to four venues starting in mid 2010.
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The Harn Museum GAWU exhibition Fall 2005
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El Anatsui is a highly respected contemporary artist who has exhibited in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North and South America. His work resides in many major art collections, including those of the British Museum, the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution and the World Bank in Washington, D.C.
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National Museum of African Arts: GAWU
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Artworks by El Anatsui featured as well as podcasts, discussion of the artist and his unique artistic representations of contemporary African art for the world.
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El Anatsui: Process and Project / New York Exhibition
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The Museum for African Art and BRIC Arts | Media | Bklyn are proud to present thirty years of never-before-seen drawings and sketches by the internationally acclaimed sculptor El Anatsui. El Anatsui: Process and Project will be on view at the BRIC Rotunda Gallery, 33 Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights, from March 25 to May 2.
El Anatsui: Process and Project opens in advance of El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa, a major retrospective of the artist's career, organized by the Museum for African Art, and an inaugural exhibition at the Museum's new building on Museum Mile in Manhattan, set to open in 2010. Many of the sketches in Process and Project depict ceramic and wood sculptures lent by the artist for the forthcoming retrospective.
El Anatsui: Process and Project is organized by the Museum for African Art, New York. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
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EL ANATSUI NEW YORK - October Gallery
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Highlights & pictures from an Exhibition at the October Gallery in New York City November 1st through December 22nd 2006.
"In Mr. Anatsui's hands, it is a shining, new kind of cloth, permeable but indestructible. It is a universal repository of names of infinite extension. Glinting and shimmering, it reflects an African essence of three interchangeable parts always in motion: memory, reality, determination."
Holland Cotter, New York Times, November 2005
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Africa Unchained Blog: El Anatsui
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AFRICA UNCHAINED Blog features El Anatsui. Written by Emeka Okafor, who is an entrepreneur who lives in New York City. He was the director for TED Global 2007 that took place in Arusha, Tanzania and is the TED Africa Director.
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El Anatsui: Reclaiming the Arts
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El Anatsui is gaining in reputation in the art world. His use of discarded tops and food tins also helps the environment. An article about his 2005 exhibit in Nottingham (UK).
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El Anatsui: Between Earth and Heaven, 2006
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This work by an African master of international renown is a highly original creation that constitutes a response to a classic canonical form of expression. It is a powerful instance of the vitality of contemporary expression in Africa and the continuity that exists with the traditional forms that are the focus of the Museum's collection. The recent series of works that Between Earth and Heaven relates to refer to the celebrated West African traditions of strip-woven textiles, namely that of kente developed by Akan and Ewe weavers in Anatsui's native Ghana. Those traditional textiles are at once monumental in scale and highly sculptural in the way they drape the body as the apparel of leaders. The undulation of this work evokes that tactile quality, and its resplendent color scheme of gold, red, and black translates and transposes the aesthetic of finely woven silk into the medium of base metal.
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The Eden Project: TOTEMS by El Anatsui
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El Anatsui was commissioned by the Eden Project to create a major sculptural installation - TOTEMS - in the Humid Tropics Biome. These totems were created to mark the entrance to the West African zone in the Humid Biome at the Eden Project.
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AFRICAN ARTS: El Anatsui: TRANSFORMATIONS
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El Anatsui: Transformations
Article written by Lisa Binder appearing in:
African Arts
Summer 2008, Vol. 41, No. 2, Pages 24-37
PDF version posted Online April 29, 2008.
Lisa Binder is an assistant curator at the Museum for African Art, New York. She is completing her PhD at the University of East Anglia in the School of World Arts, where she researches the contemporary arts of Africa in the UK art market.
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El Anatsui: Man of the Earth
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El Anatsui interview with Denrele Ogunwa of the UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA - AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER. El Anatsui talks about his art & exhibitions, how he creates his art and about his life as an African artist.
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Profile: El Anatsui
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El Anatsui, one of West Africa's most renowned sculptors has worked, lectured and exhibited throughout Europe, West Africa and the United States. This October Gallery site reveals some of his many accomplishments.
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