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El Anatsui | Freedom | 2022

24 March - 02 June 2022
Goodman Gallery, Cape Town

Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Freedom, El Anatsui’s first major solo exhibition at Goodman Gallery Cape Town. With a career spanning five decades, El Anatsui is one of the most important contemporary artists — awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale alongside Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat in 2017, as well as the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, the Venice Biennale’s highest honour, in 2015. Anatsui is best known for his ability to meticulously transform simple materials into complex assemblages that create distinctive visual impact. Freedom follows El Anatsui’s comprehensive survey at the Haus der Kunst; El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale (2019), which travelled from Munich to Doha and Bern as well as his museum solo exhibition, Meyina (2018), at the Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town.

Bringing together a new body of work, the exhibition reflects Anatsui’s focus on scale, continuing his method of using materials ubiquitous and relevant to his environment. The exhibition title is a nod to Anatsui’s monumental tapestry of the same. In Freedom traces and outlines weave themselves into striking patterns that recall cartographic entanglements. An arrangement of aluminium, copper wire and nylon string creates pathways and routes that challenge spatial contours. Three birds are reflected in the work, which Anatsui refers to as “birds of freedom” or “birds with the freedom to soar” that challenge the many rules and regulations that restrict the free movement of people.

Sovereignty uses a combination of biotic, non-linear and ordered lines chaotically tangled to reflect the violently established laws that organise the flow of humans through restrictions, while also drawing attention to natural pathways and channels.

Artworks

Aluminium, copper wire and nylon string
Work: 310 x 893 cm
Unavailable
Aluminium, copper wire and nylon string
Work: 360 x 315 cm
Aluminum, copper wire, and nylon string
Work: 415 x 657 cm
Painted wood
Work: 153 x 208 cm
Unavailable
Aluminium, copper wire and nylon string
Work: 400 x 400 cm
Unavailable

Films

About

El Anatsui image

El Anatsui

El Anatsui (b. 1944, Ghana) is an internationally acclaimed artist who transforms simple materials into complex assemblages that create distinctive visual impact. Anatsui uses resources typically discarded such as liquor bottle caps and cassava graters to create sculptures that defy categorisation. Anatsui’s use of these materials reflects his interest in reuse, transformation, and an intrinsic desire to connect to his continent while transcending the limitations of place. His work interrogates the history of colonialism and draws connections between consumption, waste and the environment. But at the core of Anatsui’s work is his unique formal language that distinguishes his practice.

Anatsui is well-known for large scale sculptures composed of thousands of folded and crumpled pieces of metal sourced from local alcohol recycling stations and bound together with copper wire. These intricate works, which can grow to be massive in scale, are both luminous and weighty, meticulously fabricated yet malleable. He leaves the installations open and encourages the works to take different forms every time they are installed.

In 2015, Anatsui was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, the Venice Biennale’s highest honour. Anatsui’s solo exhibition Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui, was organized by the Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio (2012), and travelled to the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (2013); then to the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, Florida (2014); and concluded at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, California (2015). In 2019, El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale, a major career survey curated by Okwui Enwezor, opened at Haus der Kunst and travelled to Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Kunstmuseum Bern and Guggenheim Bilbao in 2020.

Anatsui currently lives and works between Ghana and Nigeria. 

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