El Anatsui, Solo exhibition

As a sculptor, I believe that you must work with what your environment throws up.

The idea is that life is not static. As human beings, we constantly grow and change. So, if we say that art is life, then there is an aspect of life that one should be able to work with, to engage with a form that can do anything, that can adapt itself to any situation. Humans, animals and trees can adapt to changing conditions; the artwork should be able to do the same.

What I do is to not bother about these classifications but instead conflate all of them and work with them. Although, having said that, initially my thinking and operation was that of a sculptor – a sculptor working with form that was very free and loose, to the point that I could do anything with the initial idea. Later on, I started paying attention to color. Because I saw that the bottle caps came in many colors – yellows, blacks, reds – I got to think also like a painter.

--El Anatsui, 2024

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is immensely proud to present a new exhibition by the well-established Ghanean artist El Anatsui. The exhibition presents five new bottle-cap works, coming directly from his studio in Tema, near Accra, Ghana. It’s the fourth solo exhibition of Anatsui at the Axel Vervoordt Gallery, since his collaboration at Artempo. Where Time Becomes Art with the huge installation of Fresh and Fading Memories I-IV on the façade of Palazzo Fortuny in Venice in 2007. It’s the first gallery exhibition worldwide since his monumental installation for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, Behind the Red Moon, created in 2023.

El Anatsui (b. 1944, Anyako, Ghana) is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of his generation. His monumental, tapestry-like sculptures are made from thousands of discarded aluminium bottle caps, often from liquor bottles , which he and his entire team cut, flatten, twist, pierce, fold and stitch together using copper wire. Anatsui began using bottle caps in the early 2000s after discovering them in a bag discarded by a local alcohol distillery in Nigeria. He was struck by their vibrant colours, textured surfaces, and symbolic potential. For Anatsui, these simple bottlecaps symbolise the history of trade and colonialism, particularly through the link between alcohol, commerce and exploitation. They also reflect on everyday realities of contemporary African life and global consumer culture. By reusing and recycling this waste material into fluid, transformative and site-responsive installations, Anatsui embodies the idea of transformation, turning trash into treasure, pain into beauty, history into presence.

Since his comprehensive exhibition El Anatsui: a Triumphant Scale organised by the late curator Okwui Enwezor at Haus der Kunst in Munich, which travelled further to Mathaf in Doha and later to Kunstmuseum Bern, Anatsui made a profound life change. After spending his adult life in Nigeria where he was a professor at the Nsukka University, he returned to Ghana and established a large studio in Tema, outside Accra—deliberately distanced from the city’s social whirl and close to the rhythms of everyday labor. El Anatsui leads this highly collaborative studio environment, like a creative workshop, where he trains and encourages his team of local artisans to develop their own techniques. Tasks are often delegated, with team members responsible for specific steps in the process, which are very time-consuming: cleaning, sorting, crushing, folding, slicing the various small units and then and stitching them into intricate components. These are then joined with copper wire into shimmering compositions—networks, grids, spirals, and swells. Once the modular components are ready, Anatsui steps in to orchestrate the overall composition like a magician. He directs the layout, makes changes, and determines the final expansive form. In his words: “I don’t see myself as the sole author of the work. I give them [his collaborators] freedom to innovate within the process... That’s how the material itself evolves.” Working with this vast team of collaborators bears a social aspect that he loves and cherishes.

This new exhibition features recent works that further Anatsui’s ongoing exploration of the sculptural and the pictorial. Contrasting to his former works, these new series are presented flat on the wall enhancing their pictorial qualities. These pieces balance abstraction with faint echoes of representation, and their titles—Lingering, Gravitas, Conflict Resolution, Interlude, and AR’—offer clues to the conceptual landscapes they inhabit. Each work is distinct, shaped by the virtually limitless possibilities of the artist’s chosen materials: discarded bottle caps and aluminium seals from common alcohol brands across Africa, like Lord’s, Seaman’s, and Castello Gin.

In Lingering the center of the work is composed of an impressive large bright yellow plane made with caps from the brand Chelsea London dry Gin cut into hexagons and joined, overlapping, in a seemingly random fashion without articulations. This yellow form is surrounded by a geometric openwork design where slender folded pieces of the neck are combined with the disk from the top of the cap creating a kind of indecipherable hieroglyphic script. In between, he uses some parts made with “singlets”, or loops made from thin perforated strips below the cap, not linked like a chain, but wired together on four sides, creating the impression of a transparent fish net.

In Conflict Resolution and Gravitas, the artist incorporates pieces of zinc printing plates alongside the bottle caps, adding ghostly impressions of calendars, newsprint, and everyday typography. These are larger than the bottle top formats, cut into squares with the edges folded, sometimes dabbed with paint, and sometimes creased for relief. Most of them bear traces of texts, worn out and no longer readable, tracing the passage of time and the persistence of memory In Gravitas he also uses thin perforated strips flattened and folded to make a square with an open center.

Interlude bears a very dynamic composition, using a large variety of formats and shapes with a dizzying effect in the center due to the busy patterns of the caps positioned in various directions.

AR’ presents a very bright red monocolour form in the center made of hexagon cut caps, bearing no logo, surrounded by “graphic lines” in slender strips cut vertically in silver and alternating red and black. The surrounding black and golden fragments enhances the painterly and graphic composition of the work.

While Anatsui rarely offers literal interpretations of his titles, he uses them to evoke emotions, rhythms, and ideas that resonate with the work’s form, material, and symbolism. For these works, the titles range from intransitive verbs (Lingering) to nouns signifying qualities (Gravitas), qualitative ideas (Conflict Resolution) and time-related concepts (Interlude and AR’). Anatsui has said of his titles: “Titles are like signposts... They don’t explain the work. They offer a way in.”

With this new body of work, Anatsui continues to redeem industrial detritus into forms of astonishing beauty—works that are at once sensuous and sharp, celebratory, critical and contemporary ecological. His art transforms the remnants of postcolonial economies into something luminous and alive: a powerful meditation on history, material, and transformation.