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Akron Art Museum presents Gravity and Grace. Monumental Works by El Anatsui

Akron Art Museum presents Gravity and Grace. Monumental Works by El Anatsui in an exhibition on view through October 7, 2012.

Organized by Interim Chief Curator Ellen Rudolph, in collaboration with the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, and funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Gravity and Grace highlights Anatsui’s most recent work and features twelve monumental metal wall and floor sculptures widely considered to represent the apex of the artist’s career. In addition, a series of drawings illuminates the artist’s process, while wooden wall reliefs reference his extensive work in wood and display fascinating compositional relationships to the large metal pieces. The works traveled in Japan in 2010-11 as part of an exhibition curated by Japanese art historian Yukiya Kawaguchi.


El Anatsui Earth’s Skin, 2009, aluminum and copper wire, approx. 177 x 394 in., Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY. Photo by Susan Vogel.

El Anatsui’s work has won worldwide acclaim for its power and splendor. He is widely celebrated for transforming discarded objects into shimmering, pliable artworks of monumental beauty. Drawing on artistic and aesthetic traditions from his birth country of Ghana, his home in Nigeria and various Western art forms including modernist and post-modern modes of expression, Anatsui culls from his environment, both natural and manmade, as a source of material and motivation.

Merging personal, local and global concerns into his work, Anatsui has said he is inspired by the “huge piles of detritus from consumption” due to West Africa’s limited recycling technology. Cultural, economic and social issues of colonialism, globalism, waste and consumerism are explored under the cloak of beauty.

In Nigeria, local distilleries produce dozens of different brands of spirits in bottles of various sizes that are recycled after use. The discarded aluminum tops, seals and labels, however, are gathered by the artist. After being bent, twisted and pieced together, they are transformed into massive, richly colored and luxuriously textured tapestries. Given liquor’s key history in the slave trade, these works reference earlier relationships between Europe, Africa and the United States.

Anatsui is also captivated by the history of use that such materials retain, reflecting the social “lives” and meanings of the original objects. Explains the artist, his works “become loaded – ‘charged’ is maybe the right word – with a lot of meaning, and talking about all the various states that they’ve gone through or the various uses that they’ve been put to – this is all written upon them.”

Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works of El Anatsui invites visitors to question where art comes from as well as explore the development of works by this internationally celebrated artist. In his work, Anatsui strikes a rare combination of stunning beauty, fascinating communal process and deep metaphorical and poetic meaning. Just as the work is greater than the sum of its thousands of parts, its meaning transcends the particular cultural influences that contribute to the artist’s psyche and embody something universal that strikes a chord in every one of us.

Throughout his career El Anatsui has experimented with a variety of media including wood, ceramics and paint. In recent years, he has focused on discarded metal materials, for which his art is best known today.

Born 1944 in Ghana, El Anatsui has lived and worked in Nigeria since 1978. He earned a bachelor’s from College of Art, University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Art Education, University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. In 2008, in order to focus on his studio work, he resigned his longtime position as a professor of art at University of Nigeria, Nsukka where he began teaching in 1975.

Anatsui’s work is included in numerous public and private collections including the British Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Akron Art Museum, High Museum of Art and Denver Art Museum among many others. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1990 as well as 2007, when his large works became the Biennale’s most talked-about, photographed and reproduced works of art, catapulting the modest Nigerian art professor to worldwide prominence after forty years working as an artist. A traveling retrospective, El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa, was organized by the Museum for African Art in 2010.

Akron Art Museum
One South High, Akron, OH 44308
Tel: 330.376.9185
Fax: 330.376.1180
www.AkronArtMuseum.org

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