New work of El Anatsui,
Jack Shainman Gallery
W 24st. New York
Gravity and Grace, 2013 (Brooklyn Museum)
About:
El Anatsui is an internationally acclaimed artist who transforms simple materials into complex assemblages that create distinctive visual impact. He uses resources typically discarded such as liquor bottle caps and cassava graters to create sculpture that defies categorization. His use of these materials reflects his interest in reuse, transformation, and an intrinsic desire to connect to his continent while transcending the limitations of place. His work can interrogate the history of colonialism, and draw connections between consumption, waste, and the environment, but at the core is his unique formal language that distinguishes his practice.
Broken Bridge 1, 2012.
Anatsui is well-known for large scale sculpture composed of thousands of folded and crumpled pieces of metal sourced from local alcohol recycling stations and bound together with copper wire. These intricate works, which can grow to be massive in scale, are both luminous and weighty, meticulously fabricated yet malleable. He leaves the installations open and encourages the works to take different forms every time they are installed. In the 2003 Fowler Museum catalogue accompanying his touring exhibition El Anatsui: Gawu he said “I don’t want to be a dictator. I want to be somebody who suggests things.”
In morphing to fit various installation spaces, Anatsui’s sculptures, which are often wall-based, challenge long-held views of sculpture as something rigid and insistent and open up his work to exist on its own terms. “I work more like a sculptor and a painter put together,” he said in an interview with Chika Okeke-Agulu that accompanied a solo exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in (2011). In a New York Times review of his (2010) solo exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, Roberta Smith wrote “…the works evoke lace but also chain mail; quilts but also animal hides; garments but also mosaic, not to mention the rich ceremonial cloths of numerous cultures. Their drapes and folds have a voluptuous sculptural presence, but also an undeniably glamorous bravado.”
Drainpipes, 2010.
El Anatsui was born in Ghana and currently lives and works between Ghana and Nigeria. Solo exhibitions include Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui at the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa. The exhibition was organized and previously on view at the Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio, and will travel to the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, Florida, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, California. Anatsui has been featured in many international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in both (1990) and (2007) and the Paris Triennial in (2012). He has recently created large scale public installations, including Broken Bridge II, commissioned by High Line Art and presented by Friends of the High Line, on view on a wall next to the High Line from (2012-2013), and Tsiatsia – Searching for Connection, which was installed on the façade of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in summer (2013).
Installation view, 2012-2013 (Jach Shainman Gallery).
Anatsui is included in numerous private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Washington, the Akron Art Museum, Ohio, the St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri, the Museum Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf, the Setagaya Museum, Tokyo, and the British Museum, London.
El Anatsui has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2005. Solo exhibitions with the gallery include Pot of Wisdom(2012), El Anatsui (2010) and Zebra Crossing (2008).
