ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

The sculptor El Anatsui, born in Ghana in 1944, merges personal, local, and global concerns in his visual creations. Weaving together discarded aluminum tops from Nigerian liquor bottles, Anatsui creates large-scale sculptures called gawu (“metal” or “fashioned cloth” in the artist’s first language) that demonstrate a fascinating interplay of color, shape, and fluidity. For Anatsui, the bottle caps represent a link between Africa, Europe, and North America: “Alcohol was one of the commodities [Europeans] brought with them to exchange for goods in Africa,” he explains. “Eventually alcohol became one of the items used in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. . . . I thought that the bottle caps had a strong reference to the history of Africa.”

Although Anatsui has exhibited a diverse and extraordinary body of work for more than thirty years, he came to international prominence in 2004, when his work was included in Africa Remix, the landmark exhibition presented in Düsseldorf, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Stockholm.

Here at the Clark, Anatsui’s colorful works bring their own architecture and logic into Tadao Ando’s Stone Hill Center, a building shaped around light and delicate transitions. These contemplative spaces provide an undistracted environment where one can experience Anatsui’s immersive sculptures and consider the stories they tell of consumerism, waste, and colonialism under the cloak of beauty.

This exhibition was organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and was curated by David Breslin.
El Anatsui’s work is also the subject of a retrospective organized by the Museum for African Art that is currently touring North America.

El Anatsui at the Clark

El Anatsui in conversation with Chika Okeke-Agulu
with an essay by Alisa LaGamma

The Ghanaian-born sculptor El Anatsui is one of the most significant artistic innovators of our time, merging personal, local, and global concerns in his visual creations. By weaving together discarded aluminum tops from Nigerian liquor bottles, Anatsui creates large-scale sculptures that demonstrate a fascinating interplay of color, shape, and fluidity.

Published to accompany an exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, this catalogue features an intimate look at several of the artist’s recent works, including Strips of Earth’s Skin (2008), Intermittent Signals (2009), and Delta (2010). Scholar and curator Alisa LaGamma provides a brief illustrated history of El Anatsui’s career and an analysis of his practice. The noted artist, curator, and professor Chika Okeke-Agulu engages his former teacher in a lively discussion of the themes of history, economy, sustainability, and identity explored within the artist’s work. Dramatic photographs of the installations at the Clark provide a unique look at these immersive sculptures.

Alisa LaGamma is Curator in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and is the author of numerous books on African art.

Chika Okeke-Agulu,a 2008 Clark Fellow, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and has published widely on African and African Diaspora art history and theory.