NEW YORK: El Anatsui

Image via mnuchingallery.com.

El Anatsui: Metas

October 28 – December 13, 2014

MNUCHIN GALLERY

45 East 78^th Street

New York, NY

From mnuchingallery.com:

Mnuchin Gallery is proud to announce an exhibition by globally renowned contemporary artist El Anatsui. The show will present a body of entirely new work by the artist, inspired in part by the architectural spaces of the gallery’s historic townhouse. This will be Anatsui’s first exhibition in New York since his acclaimed solo show, Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui, traveled to the Brooklyn Museum in 2013. It is the artist’s first exhibition on New York’s Upper East Side and is organized in collaboration with Jack Shainman Gallery.

Anatsui’s work transforms humble recycled materials, such as liquor bottle caps and labels, into glittering abstractions that blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Often mounted on the wall in richly textured folds, they bring to mind jewel-toned mosaics and embellished textiles. Born in Ghana and currently living between Ghana and Nigeria, Anatsui references the colonial histories, local economies, and aesthetic practices of both countries. His work transcends geographic boundaries, engaging in an international dialogue concerning consumption and the environment, as well as with global abstract traditions, including that of Western painting.

Mnuchin Gallery has a long history of presenting the highest caliber of monumental abstraction. With a reputation for museum-quality shows by Abstract Expressionists including Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, the gallery has also championed contemporary figures, such as David Hammons, who mine the tensions between high/low materials to expand abstract painting’s field of reference. Mnuchin Gallery is privileged to carry on in this tradition with El Anatsui, whose show will mark its first primary market presentation since David Hammons’s exhibition of tarp paintings in 2011.

Exhibit Link

One Man’s Trash: El Anatsui Remixes Refuse at Jack Shainman and Mnuchin

NEW YORK: El Anatsui

Image via jackshainman.com.

Trains of Thought

October 18 – November 15, 2014

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

524 West 24^th Street

New York, NY

From jackshainman.com:

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by El Anatsui. Continuing to employ his primary medium of metal in the form of liquor bottle caps, printing plates and copper wire, Anatsui transforms the material into both draping wall pieces and three-dimensional works that hover between painting and sculpture.

Throughout his oeuvre, Anatsui has focused enormous attention on the language of his materials. Through folds and twists he pushes the metal parts beyond themselves, transforming them from microcosmic elements into sutured surfaces that are at once commanding and delicately intricate. Radical in his approach to abstraction, Anatsui circumvents traditional approaches to the picture plane through shape and dimensionality borrowed from and imposed upon, the material.

Along with his use of found aluminum and copper wire, Anatsui has additionally worked small pieces of newspaper printing plates into his iconic hanging sculptures. First seen in Waste Paper Bags (2004) the printing plates, discarded by local newspapers, have been cut down to create the same visual effect as the folded bottle caps, but with added strength enabled by their thicker composition. When creased or crumpled, the printing plates contribute a new layer of complex texture to the work, creating both slashing disruptions across the surface or speckling it with an expressionist impasto.

With a career spanning nearly four decades, Anatsui’s transformation and interrogation of material endures throughout his practice. The new work, with its evolutions in chromatic statements and continuous shifts of form are exquisite manifestations of the idiom he has made all his own.

El Anatsui was born in Ghana and currently lives and works between Ghana and Nigeria. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, from March 5 – June 28, 2015. This exhibition was organized and previously on view at the Akron Art Museum, Ohio, Brooklyn Museum, New York, the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa and the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, Florida. Anatsui has been featured in international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1990 and 2007) and the Paris Triennial (2012). Recent large scale public installations include Broken Bridge II, commissioned by High Line Art and presented by Friends of the High Line (2012-2013), and Tsiatsia – Searching for Connection, which was installed on the façade of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2013.

Anatsui is included in numerous private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Washington; the Akron Art Museum, Ohio; St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri; Museum Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf; the Setagaya Museum, Tokyo, and the British Museum, London, England.today’s digital generation. Hassan empowers these abandoned objects and guides our memory toward past shared experiences without losing the direction of a changing time.

Exhibit Link

WAISTED: El Anatsui

Photograph by Thomas Lohr for Hero magazine. (Issue 8, Winter/Spring 12/13.)

BlackArtistNews | June 20, 2013

For decades, artists from Piet Mondrian to Andy Warhol have been revered and relied upon for inspiration by fashion designers worldwide.  So when BlackArtistNews came across this image of a bottle top waist coat by Contemporary Wardrobe in Hero magazine, an instantaneous connection was made between it and the work of El Anatsui. While it’s questionable whether the item was influenced by the acclaimed talent, there’s no question an Anatsui-influenced waist coat is far more affordable than an Anatsui original work of art.

Grace and Gravity: Monumental Works by El Anatsui is currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum with scheduled stops at the Des Moines Art Center (2013-2014) and the Bass Museum of Art in Miami (2014). 

ACQUISITION: El Anatsui

From the NY Times, April 25, 2013:

The Brooklyn Museum has been collecting African art since 1900. It was also the first American museum to present African objects as art rather than ethnographic data, and in 1923 it organized one of the largest exhibitions of African art anywhere. Right now its special exhibition is Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui, devoted to Mr. Anatsui, the contemporary African artist known for his magical wall hangings fashioned from everyday materials.

This week the museum announced that it has acquired “Black Block,” its first work by Mr. Anatsui. The two-panel wall hanging from 2010 is part of the show. “It’s one of his signature pieces,” said Eugenie Tsai, the museum’s curator of contemporary art.

Unlike the colorful, shimmering wall hangings that Mr. Anatsui has become known for, “Black Block” is monochromatic. When the exhibition closes in August, “Black Block” will travel with the show to the Des Moines Art Center, the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego.

Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui

on view at Brooklyn Museum February 8 through August 4, 2013