El Anatsui

Biography

The first thing El Anatsui remembers about his art is chalk letters on a school blackboard. He was very small, just out of kindergarten, and he wrote them out so carefully that the headmaster began giving him extra chalk. He saw the letters more as pictures: it was their shape that held him.

Signs would come back into his work later, though different ones.

Anatsui was born in 1944 in Anyako, in the Volta Region in the south-east of Ghana. He studied at the College of Art in Kumasi, now part of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology: he took a bachelor’s degree in 1968 and a diploma in art education in 1969. While still a student he was singled out at Ghana’s first national art competition. They were taught everything Western, he says, and he felt the lack of something else. He began going to the National Cultural Centre in Kumasi, to the musicians, weavers and printers, and there he came across adinkra, a system of traditional symbolic signs. For him this was a first encounter with abstract art. His models became older Ghanaian artists, Oku Ampofo, Vincent Akwete Kofi and Kofi Antubam, who had turned away from borrowed forms in favour of local ones. Anatsui himself spoke of “sankofa”, which can be translated as “go back and fetch it”: Ghana became independent while he was in secondary school, and he wanted to bring back what had been pushed aside. After graduating he taught at a teacher-training college in Winneba, in the very post that Kofi had held.

In 1975 Anatsui moved to the University of Nigeria at Nsukka. There he became a senior lecturer (1982), and from 1996 to 2011 he headed the Department of Fine and Applied Arts and was professor of sculpture. A so-called Nsukka group formed around the university, and his name is usually linked with it. In the 1970s he worked mainly in wood. He took market trays, on which traders lay out food and goods, and carved or burned adinkra signs into them with a red-hot iron rod; he assembled wall panels from wooden slats worked with a chainsaw, chisel, fire and paint. In the late 1970s he turned to clay, to broken pots. What interested him was that a broken pot does not die: its shards are put to use for offerings, as if the vessel had passed into the world of the ancestors and spirits. In 1983 he made two large sculptures for the Nsukka campus, and in 1984 he was one of ten artists invited to a sculpture symposium in Cuxhaven, in West Germany.

International recognition came in 1990: a group exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem and an honourable mention at the 44th Venice Biennale, where he took part in an exhibition of five contemporary African artists. His first solo exhibition outside Africa took place in London in 1995. At the Osaka sculpture triennials he won prizes in 1995 and 1998.

Then came the bottle caps. Anatsui gets them from collection points for liquor bottles, flattens them and stitches them together with copper wire into huge flexible sheets that hang on the wall like cloth. The metal looks rigid, yet the sheet folds freely, and each time it is installed it can be hung in a new way. These works recall West African cloth sewn from woven strips, and every cap still carries the name of a drink. What interests him is that an object that has passed through people’s hands bears the traces of those hands, and that a cap, once taken out of its everyday use, brings its history along with it. The very breaking down and reassembling of material is tied in his work to what Africa went through under colonialism and after independence. In 2005 such works were shown in an American city for the first time, in the exhibition “Danudo” at the Skoto Gallery in New York, and that same year one of them entered the permanent display of the de Young Museum in San Francisco. At the 2007 Venice Biennale walls were built specially for him in the Palazzo Fortuny, and on them hung three “Dusasa” sheets, gold, red and black. After Venice he stopped calling them “cloths” and spoke simply of “hangings”. I think that is the more accurate word: a cloth invites touching, while here what matters is how the metal catches the light.

The retrospective “When I Last Wrote to You about Africa” opened in 2010 at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and toured museums in the United States for three years. In 2013 the Brooklyn Museum showed the exhibition “Gravity and Grace”. The survey exhibition “Triumphant Scale”, prepared by Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, opened at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in March 2019 and then moved to Doha and to the Kunstmuseum Bern (2020). His awards include the Prince Claus Award (2009), an honorary doctorate from Harvard (2016), the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement (2015) and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale (2017), which he was the first Ghanaian to receive. In 2023 “Time” magazine put him on its list of the hundred most influential people.

In that same year, 2023, Anatsui filled the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London. The work “Behind the Red Moon” is assembled from thousands of metal bottle tops and scraps and is bound up with the materials through which the transatlantic slave trade passed; it was on show until 14 April 2024.