El Anatsui
dal 29/3/2011 al 25/6/2011
Segnalato da
29/3/2011
El Anatsui
Davis Museum, Wellesley
When I Last Wrote to You about Africa. The exhibition features some sixty works in wood, metal, ceramic, painting, print and drawing. From its earliest to its most recent examples, artist's work is characterized by the complex and surprising manipulation of materials, labor-intensive methods, and a signature use of color, line and form.
curated by Lisa Binder
The Davis Museum and Cultural Center is pleased to present the U.S. debut of El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa, the artist’s first career retrospective. Surveying nearly five decades of the artist’s internationally renowned career, the exhibition features some sixty works in wood, metal, ceramic, painting, print and drawing.
While much of El Anatsui’s sculpture makes use of found objects, the artist has stated that the
work is less about recycling or salvaging than about seeking meaning in the ways materials
can be transformed to make statements about history, culture, and individual and collective
memory.
In the 1970s, El Anatsui began to manipulate broken ceramic fragments. With their allusions to
ancient Nok terracotta sculptures and West African myths about the earth and their cultural
references to the use of clay, the ceramic works piece together shattered ideas and histories.
His wooden sculptures from this period are created by chopping, carving, burning and etching
signs and symbols that reference various cultures and languages from across the globe.
The 1990s marked a crucial shift from working with hand tools to carving with a power saw,
which enabled the artist to cut through blocks of wood, leaving a jagged surface. In some
compositions these dramatic incisions stand for the scars left by the European colonial
encounter with Africa.
In his most recent metal wall sculptures, El Anatsui assembles thousands of Nigerian liquor-
bottle tops into moving patterns of stunning visual impact, transforming this simple material into
large shimmering forms.
The colors and patterns in El Anatsui’s gestural acrylic paintings and ink drawings, made at
various points during his career and exhibited outside of Nigeria for the first time, resonate with
his work in other materials. These vibrant and beautiful works subtly unify the retrospective,
referencing the artist’s larger themes and revealing much about his process.
El Anatsui (b. 1944, Ghana) is best known for his most recent sculptures, shimmeringly beautiful and elaborately wrought large-scale wall hangings made from discarded liquor-bottle tops. Drawing on traditional idioms and contemporary art practices, his work resonates materially and symbolically with the cultural and historical conditions of West Africa.
From its earliest to its most recent examples, Anatsui’s work is characterized by the complex and surprising manipulation of materials, labor-intensive methods, and a signature use of color, line and form.
Exhibition curator Lisa Binder writes, “The vocabulary of El Anatsui’s work is inextricably bound to the materials he uses and the way in which seemingly disparate pieces relate to a whole. Although the elements are singularly humble, they become collectively.
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue 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.
Organized by the Museum for African Art, New York, the exhibition has been supported, in part, by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The presentation at the Davis is generously supported by Wellesley College Friends of Art, and by the Kathryn Wasserman Davis ’28 Fund for World Cultures and Leadership.
El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa is presented on Floor 5, in the Harold and Estelle Newman Tanner Gallery and the Joanne Larson Jobson Gallery; and on the Lower Level, in the Gerald and Marjorie Schechter Bronfman Gallery and the Camilla Chandler and Dorothy Buffum Chandler Gallery.
Image: El Anatsui, Plot A Plan III, 2007. Aluminum and copper wire, 73 x 97 in. Photo courtesy: Jack Shainman Gallery.
Media contact:
Nina J. Berger 781.283.2034 nberger@wellesley.edu
Opening wednesday march 30, 2011 h 6:00-8:00pm
Davis Museum
106 Central Street (Wellesley College ) - Wellesley
Hours
Tue 11 am – 5 pm
Wed 11 am – 8 pm
Thur–Sat 11 am – 5 pm
Sun 12 am – 4 pm
Closed Mon, Major Holidays & Campus Recesses
Admission free