The latest exhibition of El Anatsui’s selected works at the October Gallery is certainly a good one to visit if you have some spare time and you find yourself in Holborn. The gallery space is small, barely a room and a half (the second room being a café), so it won’t take long to have a look at the exposed pieces, eight of them in total. That is, of course, if you will stand in front of each for about thirty seconds, as most visitor do in an art gallery.
I warmly recommend this exhibition on the base of the sensation I felt in entering the display space: A feeling of “Wow!” quickly followed by a question: “What is this?”.
El Anatsui (born in Ghana in 1944 and mainly working from Nigeria) is famous not only for his wooden sculptures, but even more for his works based on found objects, especially for his installations resembling large ancient tapestries. Many important museums, like the British Museum or the MoMa, are particularly fascinated by these, and here you can see why.
The beauty of his works, made by a material as humble as aluminuim liquor bottle tops, tied up with copper, lays in the free play between artist and form. El Anatsui’s concept of sculpture is innovative since his “tapestries” are actually sewn together with great patience, giving way to a medidative process that tells beautiful and meaningful tales concerning man, the world and their mutual relations. The waves produced in the making of a work are accidental and give every piece its uniqueness. This feature, plus the fact that his installations hang from the wall of a room, like an enormous shimmering painting, make these artworks to be sculptures in their own distinctive way, breaking the traditional rule of fixed form and reconnecting them to the developement of abstraction in the history of art. Apart from this, there is indeed another layer of meaning, which shows the multiple links between Africa and Europe in the use of parts of commercial objects (the liquor bottle tops, originally brought by Europeans to Africa), left in the street as garbage, to reproduce a sort of tapestry that closely resembles traditional kente cloth making in the Ashanti Kingdom (now divided between Ghana and Ivory Coast). It is clear that El Anatsui must have been thinking a lot about cultural exchange, even if we consider the titles he gives to his works.
Have a look, for example, at Testimonial (2014).
And these are two pictures I took from a closer perspective:
The bright colours, red and shiny gold, testify the golden surface of a world which is, to a closer look, made up of an plurality of different colours, somehow like in a Pointillist painting. And yet, while some parts are tightly interconnected, in some areas the bounds are loose, and a sense of extreme frailty re-balances the whole composition.
I feel all the three works in the room all first room deal in some way or another with mathematics, time and space connections, and the change in which we find ourselves. I don’t want to spoil the stately effect that these installations work on the visitor, so I won’t add other pictures – this may also be a gentle invite to the reader’s curiosity.
However, I want to give justice to another piece that you will find in the exhibition, making your way on the creaking floor of the gallery into the second room. Adinsibuli stood tall is a 1995 sculpture made up of two old wooden mortars used in the extraction of palm-oil from kernels. At the centre of the composition, which portrays a beautiful giant figure of a woman, El Anatsui made use of different systems of signs originated in Ghana and Nigeria. These are tools for recording ideas and events connected to a wide range of themes, from love to warfare, from family to immortality. The height of the statue, if read in connection with the symbols on her torso and more importantly with the title, may suggest that we are small and illiterate, and that we should all learn from the greatness of West Africa. Which is something I was still pondering on on my way home.
(The exhibition closes on March 28th, so don’t waste time…)
Useful links etc.:
October Gallery Official Exhibition Page: http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/exhibitions/2015els/
Fold Crumple Crush Trailer (a short documetary on El Anatsui) : http://www.susan-vogel.com/Susan-Vogel/Fold_Crumple_Crush.html
El Anatsui installing one of his pieces at Met musuem, New York: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7UBvknG8c4
Views of Difference: Different Views of Art, Catherine King ed., Yale University Press, 1999.
Diotima in the Gallery 