Skoto Gallery (in collaboration with Contemporary
African Art Gallery, New York) is pleased to
present Danudo: Recent Sculptures of El Anatsui.
This will be his first two-venue solo show
in New York since his highly acclaimed exhibition
with the American artist Sol LeWitt at Skoto
Gallery in 1996. A reception for the artist
is scheduled for Thursday, October 27th, 5-8pm.
Sculptor El Anatsui is one of Africa's most
significant contemporary artists whose work
maintains an ambitious breadth of vision that
consistently speaks to the reality of Africa's
existence. To this reality, he adds further
layers of meaning, fed by his awareness of
the culture and history of the African continent,
anawareness evolved over years of restless
intellectual and artistic enquiry. There is
an allusion to a preoccupation with both tradition
and change in his work, along with a strong
sensitivity to his material's physical expressiveness
and their cultural implications as he employs
common idioms and grammar of contemporary Western
art at the same time as he actively undermines
them by introducing ideas, techniques and material
from never yet subjugated areas that lie far
beyond the pale of Western art.
The exhibition will include
seven of his new "cloth" series
in which hundreds of aluminum liquor bottle
tops are flattened and sewn together with copper
wire to form large-scale textile inspired works
that are evocative of form and meaning. In
this body of work, detritus are combined with
formal grace and randomness with order modeled
on the color and patterning of West African
strip-woven cloth. Unlike his earlier work,
which are highly complex and powerfully integrated
wall sculpture made from strips of various
African woods in which images and motifs from
diverse backgrounds such as Akan, Adinkra,
Igbo, Uli, Nsibidi and Ejaghem syllabaries
are incised with a chain saw and blow torch,
these "metal cloths" delve deeper
into the formal roots of sculpture. Wall-oriented
and frontal, they are personal and monumental,
tactile and seductive in their glorious opulence.
El Anatsui was born 1944 in Anyako, Ghana
and has a Postgraduate Diploma in Art Education
from the University of Science and Technology,
Kumasi, Ghana. He is Professor of Sculpture
at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where
he has lectured since 1975. He exhibited at
the 1990 Venice Biennale, where he received
an honorable mention and was included in the
Johannesburg Biennale in 1995 as well as the
Gwanju Bienniale, Gwanju, South Korea, 2004.
His most recent solo exhibition Gawu has toured
England, Wales and Ireland. In August 2005,
it opened at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art
at the University of Florida in the US. He
is included in the anthology exhibition Africa
Remix, which has toured Dusseldorf, London
and Paris and will travel to Tokyo and other
cities in 2006/7. His work is in numerous public
and private collections including The Ghana
National Art Collection, Accra; Asele Institute,
Nimo, Nigeria; Nigeria National Gallery, Iganmu,
Lagos; The British Museum, London; Pompidou
Center, Paris; de Young Museum, San Francisco;
Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf, Germany; Segataya
Museum, Tokyo; The National Museum of African
Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC,
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
and The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ.
Artist's Statement on Material 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 bereavement in the village)
that I had seen decades before in the 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 colors of the caps seemed
to replicate those of traditional kente cloth.
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 encapsulates 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 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 forces 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.
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.
In Nigeria local distilleries produce dozens
of brands of spirits in bottles of various
sizes, which are recycled after use. The brands
recycle each others' bottles interchangeably,
but discard the old aluminum tops and paper
labels in the process. Brands of whisky, gin,
rum, vodka. schnapps, tonic wine and brandy
found around Nsukka include Bull, Bakassi,
Concord, Chairman, Chelsea, Canon, Dark Sailor,
Ebeano, Ecomog, Finlays, Gall, Jonathan, KP,
King Edward, King Davis, King Solomon, KingSize,
Mac Lord, Makossa, Napoleon, Nathus, Nobleman,
Nixson, Ozde, 007, One-Man Squad, Poncho Picolo,
Squadron, Top Squad etc
El Anatsui
Nsukka, Nigeria 2005
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