El Anatsui: "When I Last Wrote to You About Africa"The Museum for African Art, New York (MfAA), announces a major retrospective of internationally renowned artist El Anatsui, which begins its North American tour at the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, Canada, on October 2, 2010. El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa spans four decades, and includes approximately 60 works, drawn from public and private collections internationally. In 2011, the exhibition will move to the MfAA, where it will be one of the inaugural exhibitions in the Museum’s new building (see below).
The Ghanaian-born El Anatsui, who lives and works in Nigeria, is widely known for monumental wall sculptures made from discarded bottle tops, and is recognized as one of the most original and compelling artists of his generation. The exhibition encompasses work in wood, ceramic, and metal, as well as drawings and paintings.
The Exhibition
Throughout his career, Anatsui has transformed often-overlooked materials such as recycled metal and discarded wood into forceful visual statements that refer to global, local, and personal histories. When I Last Wrote to You About Africa brings together the full range of the artist’s work, from wood trays referring to traditional symbols of the Akan people of Ghana; to early ceramics from the artist’s Broken Pots series, driftwood assemblages that refer to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and wooden sculptures carved with a chainsaw; to the luminous metal wall-hangings of recent years, which have brought the artist international acclaim.
In the 1970s, Anatsui began to manipulate broken ceramic fragments. With their allusions to ancient Nok terracotta sculptures, West African myths about the earth, and cultural references to the use of clay, the ceramic works piece together shattered ideas and histories to form a new whole.
In his wood sculpture, dating from the 1970s, Anatsui chopped, carved, burned, and etched symbols and signs from various cultures and languages, often bringing together seemingly unrelated elements. In the 1990s, the artist made a crucial shift from working with hand tools to carving with a power saw. This mechanized tool enabled him to cut through blocks of wood, leaving a jagged surface that he likened to the scars left by the European colonial encounter with Africa.
The colors and patterns in El Anatsui’s gestural acrylic paintings and ink drawings, made at various points during his career and shown here outside of Nigeria for the first time, resonate with his work in other materials including clay, wood, and metal. These vibrant and beautiful works subtly pin together the retrospective, referencing Anatsui’s larger themes and revealing much about the artist’s process for over thirty years.
In his most recent metal wall sculptures, Anatsui assembles thousands of Nigerian liquor-bottle tops into moving patterns of stunning visual impact, transforming this simple material into large shimmering forms. When I Last Wrote to You About Africa includes the largest number of Anatsui’s works in metal ever assembled: massive wall pieces, large-scale floor installations, and a major new work created specifically for the retrospective.
The Artist
El Anatsui was born in Ghana in 1944. He earned a bachelor’s degree in sculpture and a postgraduate diploma in art education from the University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. He is currently professor of sculpture at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he has taught since 1975.
Anatsui’s work has appeared in group exhibitions at the Fowler Museum at UCLA; the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; October Gallery, London; and in the celebrated exhibition Africa Remix, which opened in 2005 in Düsseldorf and traveled to London, Paris, Tokyo, Stockholm, and Johannesburg. His work has also been included in numerous biennial exhibitions, including in Venice (1990 and 2007), Havana (1994), Johannesburg (1995), Gwangju (2004), and Sharjah (2009), as well as in Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008). Gawu, a solo show of metal sculptures, traveled throughout Europe, North America, and Asia from 2004–2008. Solo shows, including Zebra Crossing in 2008 and El Anatsui in 2010, were presented by the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. In 2008, Anatsui received the Visionaries Artist Award from the Museum of Arts and Design, in New York City. He is also a laureate of the 2009 Prince Claus Award. His work is collected by institutions internationally, including the British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; the Denver Art Museum, Denver; the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; and the de Young Museum, San Francisco.
Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by the richly illustrated catalogue El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa, with contributions by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University; Lisa Binder, Assistant Curator at the Museum for African Art, New York; Olu Oguibe, Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Connecticut; Chika Okeke-Agulu, Assistant Professor Art and Archaeology at Princeton University; and Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale School of Art. The catalogue will be published in October 2010.
The North American tour of El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa includes presentations at the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, October 2, 2010 – January 2, 2011; the Museum for African Art, New York, in winter 2011; the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, November 12, 2011 – February 5, 2012; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, March 8 – June 17, 2012; and the Denver Art Museum, September 2 – December 1, 2012.
Support
El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa is organized by the Museum for African Art, New York, and has been supported, in part, by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
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