ART-PRESENTATION: El Anatsui-Triumphant Scale

El Anatsui transforms simple, everyday materials into striking large-scale installations. His work raises questions about ethnic identity by combining traditional African techniques and imagery with abstraction (which arguably is rooted within Western art). His interest in African craft led him to be associated with the 1970s art movement Nsukka group*.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Haus der Kunst Archive

El Anatsui’s survey exhibition “Triumphant Scale” at Haus der Kunst is the most comprehensive and detailed presentation of his oeuvre thus far in Europe. The exhibition comprises key works from five decades of the artist’s career. At the core of the exhibition, which focuses on the triumphant and monumental nature of El Anatsui’s groundbreaking oeuvre, are the bottle-cap works from the last two decades, with their imposing presence and dazzling colors. The exhibition also presents the lesser known wood sculptures and wall reliefs from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, ceramic sculptures from the 1970s, as well as drawings, prints, and sketchbooks. The exhibition reveals the artist’s tireless preoccupation with the question of how a contemporary sculptural concept can be developed from the rich plastic innovations of classical and traditional African art. El Anatsui has persistently worked to transform the formal and sculptural possibilities of African sculptural idioms and, over fifty years, he has repeatedly revised and reinvented his material and compositional techniques, from the early smaller wooden reliefs with their incised markings and broken ceramic forms, to the monumental outdoor cement sculptures, and, more recently, the vast and spectacular metal wall and floor works, which blur the boundaries between sculpture, painting and assemblage. El Anatsui’s “Broken Pot” series of the 1970s is characterized by the use of negative space and fragmentation as a structuring principle, and as metaphoric statement about life, history and memory. The wood works from the following decade create intimacy less by their relatively small scale than by their incised markings, inspired by the Adinkra signs of the Akan and Uli motifs of the Igbo, or indigenous West African writing systems, such as Nsibidi, Barnum and Vai scripts. The wood sculptures also have distinctive gestural markings made with a chain saw. The metal works, produced since 2000, dwarf the viewer with their magnificence and imposing scale, while captivating at close range with their jewel-like detail. As El Anatsui said in 2003, the use of found materials is of fundamental importance: “I experimented with many materials. I also work with material that has experienced a lot of touch and use by people … and these types of materials and works are more charged than materials or pieces that I have worked with machines. Art grows out of any specific situation, and I think artists should work better with what their environment currently provides.” The weathered surfaces of the transformed objects seem initially like a meditation on transience but, El Anatsui intrinsically expands the possibilities of sculpture by responding to every material “as if he just discovered it in the flow of time and history. El Anatsui generates meaning out of his material and technical process. For example, the bottle caps come from hard liquors introduced by Europeans. as currency – and thus a means of subjugation – during the era of transatlantic slavery and colonialization. The process of cutting, flattening, squeezing. twisting, folding and joining of thousands of these bottle caps, together with copper wire that weave together fabricated sections into a single work, speaks to the making of human communities out of connected individual subjectivities. El Anatsui’s work is shaped by the interplay between the philosophical and aesthetic discourses of art and literature in post-colonial Africa. In 1962, the historic “Conference of African Writers of English Expression” at the Makerere College (now Makerere University) in Kampala, Uganda focused on the question of language and the new African literature. The participants included militant nationalists who rejected European languages as a medium for African literature and internationalists who considered global literary traditions an inspiration. Despite their differences, it became clear that Western literary traditions could not be passively accepted as the only model for new African literature. Similarly, the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, Ibadan, convened leading artists, writers from the continent committed to the production and discussion of postcolonial modernist work in Africa. Besides writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Es’kia Mphahlele and Christopher Okigbo (who were at Makerere), Mbari membership included the artists Demas Nwoko and Ibrahim El Salahi, but also Vincent Kofi who was El Anatsui’s mentor, and Uche Okeke who helped attract him to Nsukka in 1975.  Fascinated by the museum’s monumental architecture, El Anatsui has created three works especially for this exhibition: two indoor works, “Logoligi Logarithm”, “Rising Sea” and “Second Wave” on the building’s facade. “Logoligi Logarithm” consists of approximately 65 individual parts made of aluminum and copper wire, forming a walkable labyrinth. Within this concourse, manifold perspectives arise, as well as countless axes and plays of light and shadow is dedicated to the Ghanaian poet Atukwei Okai (1941-2018). “Rising Sea” is an eight-meter tall white wall and floor piece, which despite its dazzling beauty is a commentary on the pressing issue of global warming and coming disasters.  “Second Wave” is the artist’s largest work to date. It is nearly 110 meters long and consists of 22 panels, each of which is 10 meters high and 4 meters wide; the panels are connected by bridge elements. The installation consists of nearly 10,000 printing plates used in offset printing. The plates came from a Munich-based printing company that produces a newspaper, as well as from a printing plant in Balzano that produces books for an art publisher. The unused plates from the Munich printing house are incorporated on the back of the work. The plates from the printer in Balzano have been used and have thus already served as information carriers. Sorted by color gradient, they pattern the front side of the work. For the installation on the Haus der Kunst facade, the panels were folded, deformed, overlapped and riveted. The shape and design of these printing plates as well as their original purpose as information carriers are significant to the work’s meaning. Standing opposite Haus der Kunst’s facade, one sees the wave beginning to slowly surge, reaching its peak above the main entrance. To the right of the entrance, a second wave forms, faster and more urgently than the first. The monumental dimensions of the installation and the sheer volume of materials used to create it represent the daily flood of information and the challenge of keeping one’s bearings in the face of such waves.

*The Nsukka group is the name given to a group of Nigerian artists associated with the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The Nsukka group was known for working to revive the practice of uli (the traditional designs drawn by the Igbo people of Nigeria) and incorporate its designs into contemporary art using media such as acrylic paint, tempera, gouache, pen and ink, pastel, oil paint, and watercolor. Although traditionally uli artists were female, many of the artists of the group were male. Some were poets and writers in addition to being artists.

Info: Curators: Okwui Enwezor, Chika Okeke-Agulu and Dr. Damian Lentini, Haus der Kunst, Prinzregentenstraße 1, Munich, Duration: 7/3-28/7/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-20:00, Thu 10:00-22:00, https://hausderkunst.de