El Anatsui

El Anatsui (born February 4, 1944, Anyako, Ghana) is a Ghanaian sculptor who is best known for his large-scale metal tapestries constructed from bottle caps and copper wire. These pieces are a culmination of a career spent experimenting with different local materials and varied forms of handicraft. His entire oeuvre examines such themes as colonialism’s destructive forces and the resilience of Africa.

Early life and career

Anatsui was born in the British colony of the Gold Coast, 13 years before it became the independent nation of Ghana. His father was a fisherman and a weaver, and Anatsui was the youngest of his 32 children. After the death of his mother, Anatsui was sent to live with an uncle, who was a Presbyterian minister. Anatsui showed a gift for drawing and studied sculpture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. The curriculum of the school, however, was adopted from the University of London and left Anatsui longing to study and create something distinctly African. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1968, writing his thesis about chieftaincy regalia, and the following year he received a postgraduate diploma in art education.

After graduating, Anatsui taught at the Specialist Training College (now University of Education, Winneba) in Kumasi. Sometime during this period he adopted “El,” meaning divine, as his first name. He began collecting the circular wooden trays used in local markets and embossing the surfaces with adinkra symbols. Anatsui described adinkra as an “[attempt] to give visual form to very abstract concepts like ‘the soul,’ ‘anger,’ and ‘seriousness.’” Adinkra symbols are used by the Akan peoples of Ghana to enrich fabrics, walls, pottery, and other surfaces. Holland Cotter, art critic for The New York Times, later wrote that the series anticipated Anatsui’s subsequent work with its reliance on local materials and its “measure of humor. It must have amused market workers to see plain old fruit trays so elevated.”

Broken Pots series and wood sculptures

In 1975 Anatsui began teaching at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN). During his early years there, he worked on Broken Pots, a series of ceramic sculptures made from potsherds that he shattered and partially joined together. To Anatsui, the breaking of the pots symbolized the destruction of Africa through colonialism. By fusing the pieces together, he suggested the reconstruction of the continent from the fragments. Anatsui continued to explore the theme of fragmentation while participating in a residency at the Cummington Community of the Arts in western Massachusetts in 1980. There he started using power tools to carve sets of wooden planks with ideograms from African writing systems, including Nsibidi from Nigeria, Vai from Sierra Leone, and Bamum from Cameroon. The works were finished with a blowtorch and then mounted together with no specific arrangement. In the 1990s his exploration of wood as a medium turned to freestanding sculptures constructed from stacks of cut lumber. In such works as Erosion (1992), he contrasted the mechanized carvings of the chainsaw with organic engravings by hand.

Bottle caps

Anatsui exhibited his work internationally, including at the 1990 Venice Biennale, but he was not well known outside of Africa. This changed in the early 21st century, when his art shifted from wood sculptures to metal tapestries made from aluminum bottle caps. By Anatsui’s account, the new medium came about by accident. In 1998 he found a trash bag on the side of the road near Nsukka filled with the screw-top caps from alcohol bottles. The seemingly banal contents were loaded with meaning. Anatsui later explained:

Alcohol was one of the commodities brought with [Europeans] to exchange for goods in Africa. Eventually alcohol became one of the items used in the transatlantic slave trade. They made rum in the West Indies, took it to Liverpool, and then it made its way back to Africa. I thought that the bottle caps had a strong reference to the history of Africa.

He brought the bag back to his studio and began experimenting. He cut, pounded, and folded the bottle caps, allowing some of the labels and colours to show, and then he stitched the metal pieces together using copper wire. Soon he had formed a malleable sculpture that resembled an enormous, colourful, and glittering cloth.

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Anatsui continued to refine this practice, developing different types of shapes for the bottle tops and a variety of patterns for the stitches. He was also able to source a regular supply of bottle caps from a local distillery. With the help of a team of studio assistants, Anatsui often worked on one section at a time, using one colour or pattern of bottle caps, then sewing that segment with other portions to create a larger work. The process has often been compared with the making of kente cloth, a fabric traditionally made and worn by the Asante people. Kente is woven in narrow strips, which are then sewn together to create a larger cloth. Both processes allow the final piece to take an unpredictable form. One of Anatsui’s early metal works, Sasa (Manteau) (2004), reveals the spontaneity of this operation. One band of the sculpture, made from rectangular gold pieces, transforms into a hodgepodge of circular metal pieces resembling coins and a network of copper wire dotted with metal pieces.

Other works show some preplanning. For example, flattened rectangular pieces were used for Man’s Cloth and circular scraps were used for Woman’s Cloth (both 2002). When these works were installed at the October Gallery, London, in 2002, Anatsui had not yet decided how the sculptures should be displayed. The gallery’s artistic director, Elisabeth Lalouschek, mounted them as wall hangings, allowing them to slouch and ripple. Thereafter, Anatsui left the installation of his works up to the host institution, encouraging gallery technicians to give the metal tapestries a new form each time they displayed the works. This openness spoke to Anatsui’s interest in “the fact of many hands,” the hope that when “people see [his] work…they should be able to feel the presence of…people.” These people not only include gallery technicians but also Anatsui’s many studio assistants and the people who had previously used and discarded the bottle caps.

Man’s Cloth and Woman’s Cloth were acquired by the British Museum, London, in 2002, the same year of their installation, and Sasa (Manteau) was acquired by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2004, the year it was first included in the traveling exhibition “Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent.” By 2007 the de Young Museum, San Francisco, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, were among the museums that had added Anatsui’s metal tapestries to their collections. Anatsui gained international fame in 2007 when three of his monumental sculptures, Dusasa I, Dusasa II, and Fresh and Fading Memories, were shown at that year’s Venice Biennale.

Later work

In 2011 Anatsui, a lifelong bachelor, retired from teaching and moved out of the faculty housing at UNN, where he had lived for 36 years. He remained in Nsukka, where he had a studio, but he also opened work spaces in Enugu, Nigeria, and Tema, Ghana. He and his assistants continued to experiment with the vocabulary of his metal tapestries. In Red Block (2010), for example, they used only one colour and one shape of bottle cap to create a sheet of red metal fabric that draws attention to the work’s sculptural form. The installation pieces Gli (2010; Wall) and Logoligi Logarithm (2019), meanwhile, comprise panels of thin metal fragments. These works emphasize lightness and transparency, contrasting with the opaque forms of Anatsui’s early metal tapestries. Other sculptures feature calculated patterns (as in Opening of Time [2019]), spill out over the floor (Breaking News [2015]), or take three-dimensional forms (Uwa [2012]). Anatsui’s tapestries have become progressively monumental, draping the exteriors of such buildings as the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin (Ozone Layer [2010]), the Royal Academy of Arts, London (TSIATSIA-Searching for Connection [2013]), and El-Badi Palace (Qaṣr al-Badīʿ), Marrakech, Morocco (Kindred Viewpoints [2016]).

Exhibitions and awards

In addition to the Venice Biennale and the exhibition “Africa Remix,” Anatsui’s work has been shown in solo shows, including “Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui” (2012), which was organized by the Akron Art Museum, Ohio, and traveled throughout the United States. The retrospective “Triumphant Scale” (2019) opened at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, and drew record crowds. In 2023 Tate Modern, London, announced that Anatsui had been chosen to create the installation for the annual Turbine Hall commission. Anatsui received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (2015) at the Venice Biennale and the prestigious Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association (2017).