El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale
1 October 2019 – 31 January 2020
El Anatsui, born in 1944 in Anyako, Ghana and based in Nsukka, Nigeria since 1975, is Africa’s most prominent living artist. This exhibition encompasses every media used by El Anatsui in his remarkable 50 year career.
Triumphant Scale testifies to El Anatsui’s invention of a completely new and unique sculptural form and visual language, with material for artmaking revealed to him by his context of production. The laborious manual work of flattening, cutting, twisting, and crushing bottle caps and using copper wires to stitch the elements into one dazzling tapestry serves as a metaphor for the epic constitution of human society. It presents ideas that inform his practice across the diverse media that he has worked with, from circular and multi-panel wood reliefs to terracotta forms, and the later metal sculptures.
El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale, curated by Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okele-Agulu. The exhibition has been organised by Haus der Kunst, Munich, in collaboration with Qatar Museums - Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art Doha, Kunstmuseum Bern and Guggenheim Bilbao.
MATHAF: ARAB MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
