El Anatsui
Artist. Sculptor
El Anatsui is a sculptor from Ghana (Anyako, Ghana, 1944), currently living and working between Ghana and Nigeria. El Anatsui received a BA from the College of Art, University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana (1968). Since 1975 he is a professor of scultpture at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and one of the most important members of the Nsukka School.
El Anatsui is known for creating innovative, flexible and mutable sculptures that can be shaped in any way and altered in appearance for each installation, breaking with sculpture’s traditional adherence to forms of fixed shape.El Anatsui works, primarily, with wood and clay and, more recently, he also uses aluminum caps of liquor bottles, cans of condensed milk and other metal elements. His work focuses on the history and colonial experience in Africa. Among his best known sculptures are the wooden series Patches of History (1993), and the “metal cloths” Adinkra Sasa (2003) and Crumbling Wall (2000).
El Anatsui has participated in national and international exhibitions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2008-09), the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC (2008), the Venice Biennale (2007), the Hayward Gallery (2005), the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona (2001) or the Osaka Sculpture Triennial (1995), among others. In 2010, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, held a retrospective of his work, subtitled When I Last Wrote to You About Africa, which was shown throughout North America over three years. El Anatsui has won several international awards including the Prince Claus Award, Amsterdam 2009. the Kansai Telecasting Corporation Award of the Osaka Sculpture Triennial in 1995, an Honorable Mention in the 1990 Venice Biennale, among others.
Update: 9 July 2015