Tag: El Anatsui

El Anatsui: The Reinvention of Sculpture by Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke- Agulu (Bologna, Italy: Damiani). 360 pp., color and b/w illus. The acclaimed Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui represents an inspired fusion of craft and fine art. Evoking the aesthetic principles of arte povera, the art movement that sought to fashion beauty out of found natural objects and the detritus of the postwar world, he has transformed objects such as soda cans and discarded timbers into monuments rich in history and the intimation of transcendence. Now, at seventy-eight years old, he is the subject of a hefty book, El Anatsui: The Reinvention of Sculpture, by Chika Okeke-Agulu and the late Okwui Enwezor. Gravity and Grace by El Anatsui (1944–) 2010. Collection of the artist; all photographs courtesy of Damiani, Bologna, Italy. The authors are at some pains to situate El Anatsui’s work within the visual and cultural traditions of Ghana and Nigeria (where he has spent much of his career), while at the same time stressing the limits of his dependence on those forebears. What is hardly stressed at all, however, is the ease with which the sculptor can and must be understood within the context of Western modernism. His art is not to be seen as indifferent to that tradition, let alone as rebelling against it, but rather as extending and revitalizing it in an unusually fertile way. That is to say that El Anatsui, over the span of half a century, has progressed from a committed modernism—with a reverence for form as well as for those post-colonial concerns that the book ably expounds—to a postmodernist emphasis on installation and the experiential aspects of his art. Omen by Anatsui, 1978. Artist’s collection. Some of his earlier works (such as Omen from 1978, a grayish gourd made