Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Freedom, El Anatsui’s
first major solo exhibition at Goodman Gallery Cape Town.
With a career spanning five decades, El Anatsui is one of
the most important contemporary artists — awarded the
prestigious Praemium Imperiale alongside Iranian visual
artist Shirin Neshat in 2017, as well as the Golden Lion
for Lifetime Achievement, the Venice Biennale’s highest
honour, in 2015.
Anatsui is best known for his ability to
meticulously transform simple materials into complex
assemblages that create distinctive visual impact. Freedom
follows El Anatsui’s comprehensive survey at the Haus der
Kunst; El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale (2019), which travelled
from Munich to Doha and Bern as well as his museum solo
exhibition, Meyina (2018), at the Iziko National Gallery in
Cape Town.
Throughout his practice, the artist has engaged with the idea
of the land as a porous receptacle for lived experience. This
presentation of new large-scale paintings considers the body
and the land as loaded sites which carry memories and scars.
The South African artist’s distinct visual language moves
between allegory and abstraction as Van den Berg excavates
what exists – unresolved – below the surface. For this
exhibition, he returns to the concept of ‘fugitive marks’ which
he defines as ‘ghosts from the past co-existing with human
beings in the present’.
The exhibition title is a nod to Anatsui’s monumental
tapestry of the same. In Freedom traces and outlines weave
themselves into striking patterns that recall cartographic
entanglements. An arrangement of aluminium, copper
wire and nylon string creates pathways and routes that
challenge spatial contours. Three birds are reflected in
the work, which Anatsui refers to as “birds of freedom” or
“birds with the freedom to soar” that challenge the many
rules and regulations that restrict the free movement of
people.
Sovereignty uses a combination of biotic, non-linear and
ordered lines chaotically tangled to reflect the violently
established laws that organise the flow of humans through
restrictions, while also drawing attention to natural
pathways and channels.
In Drying Line strings protrude outward. These free-
flowing lines are in contrast to the more structured lines
found in other works, motioning a sense of relaxation. The
work combines warm and cooler tones balancing vigour
and noise against quietude. Through this work, Anatsui
contemplates the tension of the energy he observes outside
his studio in Tema, Ghana — filled with people during the
day and completely dead in the night.
Arranged in vertical fixed panels that are carved into rich
patterns and textures, Routes to Discovery and National
Identity Card reflect the artist’s early practice which
incorporated cut wood and lumber often sourced from the
Nsukka Market in Nigeria. In Routes to Discovery Anatsui
emphasises borders that mankind have placed to curtail
the freedom of others. The straight and structured lines are
interrupted by organic rings that offer a sense of reprieve.
Artworks
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Through works such as National Identity Card, he subtly
gestures at the different things that make up and break
apart an identity — fingerprints, a connection to heritage
and folkloric traditions as well as more contemporary tools
of identification such as DNA recognition. By embracing
one’s identity with and without its limits, Anatsui reflects his
principle of thinking about life as “a beautiful phenomenon
to be experienced and not a problem to be solved.”
Through this exhibition, ideas of play that form the
foundation of his practice are revealed in how he approaches
cumbersome materials with weightlessness and his ability
to consider the socio-political while transforming them
into personal meaning. The exhibition speaks to transience,
contingencies and possibilities that impact notions of
freedom
Artist Bio
El Anatsui (b.1944, Anyako, Ghana) is an internationally acclaimed artist who transforms simple materials into complex assemblages that create distinctive visual impact. Anatsui uses resources typically discarded such as liquor bottle caps and cassava graters to create sculptures that defy categorisation. Anatsui’s use of these materials reflects his interest in reuse, transformation, and an intrinsic desire to connect to his continent while transcending the limitations of place. His work interrogates the history of colonialism and draws connections between consumption, waste and the environment. But at the core of Anatsui’s work is his unique formal language that distinguishes his practice.
Anatsui is well-known for large scale sculptures composed of thousands of folded and crumpled pieces of metal sourced from local alcohol recycling stations and bound together with copper wire. These intricate works, which can grow to be massive in scale, are both luminous and weighty, meticulously fabricated yet malleable. He leaves the installations open and encourages the works to take different forms every time they are installed.
In 2023, Anatsui was awarded the highly reputable Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. He was also included in TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2023. His major solo exhibition titled Behind the Red Moon, at the Tate Modern, explored elemental forces interwoven with human histories of power, oppression, dispersion, and survival. In 2019, 'El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale,' a major career survey curated by Okwui Enwezor, opened at Haus der Kunst and travelled to Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Kunstmuseum Bern and Guggenheim Bilbao in 2020. In 2015, Anatsui was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, the Venice Biennale’s highest honour. Anatsui’s solo exhibition 'Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui,' was organized by the Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio (2012), and travelled to the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (2013); then to the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, Florida (2014); and concluded at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, California (2015).
Collections include: African Studies Gallery, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria; Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio; Asele Institute, Nimo, Nigeria; The British Museum, London, UK; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Jordan National Gallery of Arts, Amman, Jordan; Musée Ariana, Geneva, Switzerland; and Osaka Foundation of Culture, Osaka, Japan.
Anatsui currently lives and works between Ghana and Nigeria.
