El Anatsui’s
‘Material Wonder’
At October Gallery, London
Opens on Thursday, 28 February
October Gallery, now in its 40th year, presents an exhibition of works celebrating the force and creative vision of El Anatsui, an artist who has had a tremendous impact on the international artistic landscape. El Anatsui: Material Wonder will feature metal wall sculptures accompanied by a series of prints made in collaboration with Factum Arte, Madrid.
El Anatsui is a Ghanaian sculptor active for much of his career in Nigeria. He is undoubtedly one of the most influential artists of the present time. Throughout his long career, El Anatsui has focused his many interests to examine a wide range of subjects. He has also explored an extraordinary range of media from cement, ceramics and tropical hardwoods in his early years, to corrugated iron, cassava graters, milk-tin lids and aluminium bottle-tops in his later installations. Today, he is best known for these mesmerising works composed of many thousands of aluminium bottle tops laboriously sewn together.
The triumphant success of these works owes much to the protean nature of the material itself, which being light and flexible yet robust, is capable of being repeatedly reshaped and re-formed.
‘Change in Fortune’ El Anutsui. Image courtesy of OctoberGallery
The metal wall sculptures will also be accompanied by a series of prints made in collaboration with Factum Arte, Madrid. El Anatsui has always been fascinated by the physical history of the materials he uses and the journeys they undergo. The basic materials for his ‘fabrics’ are made by a team of assistants, who cut and pierce the aluminium strips on tables and smaller wooden ‘flats.’ After years of repetitive pricking and piercing, these wooden worktops present a scored landscape of textured relief. Using Factum Arte’s cutting-edge, 3-D scanning and plate-making technologies, these scarred surfaces are translated into printing plates. Given Factum Arte’s expertise in traditional printmaking, the resulting prints encapsulate the hidden histories of the making of the aluminium works. The very fabrication process itself is thereby ‘recycled’ into a major new series of prints by El Anatsui.
In 2014, El Anatsui was made an Honorary Royal Academician and elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2015, he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 56th Venice Biennale – All the World’s Futures, and, in 2016, the University of Cape Town conferred an Honorary Doctorate upon him. In 2017, he was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale Award for Sculpture. El Anatsui has been represented by October Gallery since 1993.
The exhibition ends on 6 April. Don’t miss it!
Please find out much more information here.
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