Default

El Anatsui
Default, 2016
Bottle caps and printing plates
309 x 323cm

'In a development that even he seems to find slightly surprising, Anatsui discovered such depth of potential in the bottle tops that he is still exploring their possibilities after twenty years. His practice is grounded in materiality and ceaseless experimentation. It has alternated between periods of gradual, evolutionary artmaking in a given medium and periods of wide, transformative exploration. “My work is about medium and new process,” he declares. In art school he absorbed “the idea that media have their own language, or if you like, their properties, and the artist is best working with those properties rather than working against them.” ' — “Material, Medium, and Practice”, in El Anatsui: Art and Life, ed. Susan M Vogel (Prestel Publishing, 2020), pg.158