El Anatsui at Patio Gallery, Kanaal
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El Anatsui
Solo exhibition
From March 15 → June 21, 2025
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.
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.
