El Anatsui

🗿El Anatsui (born 1944) is a Ghanaian sculptor active for much of his career in Nigeria.

He has drawn particular international attention for his iconic "bottle-top installations", distinctive large-scale assemblages of thousands of pieces of aluminium sourced from alcohol recycling stations and sewn together with copper wire, transformed into metallic cloth-like wall sculptures in a way that can "draw connections between consumption, waste, and the environment".

Many of Anatsui’s sculptures are mutable in form, conceived to be so free and flexible that they can be shaped in any way and altered in appearance for each installation.

Working with wood, clay, metal, and—most recently—the discarded metal caps of liquor bottles, Anatsui breaks with sculpture’s traditional adherence to forms of fixed shape while visually referencing the history of abstraction in African and European art. 

Exhibitions:

AXEL VERVOORDT GALLERY, Axel Vervoordt Gallery at Art Brussels 2018, Bruxelles, Apr 19 – 22

ZANE BENNETT CONTEMPORARY ART, Contemporary Masters, May 18, 2020 – Jun 24, 2022

More: Instagram