El Anatsui

Born 70 years ago in Anyako, Ghana,El Anatsui was educated at the Kwami Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi,Ghana,where he studied fine art. He has lived and worked at the University of Nigeria (UNN) since 1975, retiring as Professor of sculpture in 2011 and  was a former  head of  that institution's Fine and Applied Arts Department. Now an Emeritus Professor he has through his El Anatsui Foundation been mentoring a new generation of young artists from around the world.

Anatsui's sculptures are distinctive in that they are mutable and conceived to be free and flexible to the extent that they can be, and are often reshaped and altered in format every time they are installed. Working with wood, clay, metal and discarded caps of liquor bottles,Anatsui makes a sharp break with sculpture's traditional adherence to the fixed form, while referencing abstraction in african and western art. His coloured and closely patterned fields of works assembled from discarded liquor bottle caps help to trace a broader and often poignant story of colonial and contemporary economic, political and cultural exchanges in Africa evidenced in the history of discarded materials . The sculptures in wood and clay embody ideas about the function of objects,namely destruction,decay,transformation,change and rebirth/reincarnation in daily existence and the role of language in deciphering visual symbols.  

 Globally collected, his works are in numerous private and more than 40 museums and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum , Museum of Modern Art and Brooklyn Museum all in  New York; the British Museum London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Royal Ontario Museum Toronto; Setagaya Museum, Tokyo; Jordan National Gallery of Art, Amman; Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle; the Setagaya Museum, Tokyo; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art ,Kanazawa,Japan; the World Bank Art Collection,Washington DC;  UNAIDS,Geneva; the Ghana National Collection,Accra; and the National Gallery of Art, Lagos.

Anatsui's work, accepted as a 'hard-to-categorise' art form,has featured at the Venice Biennale in 1990 and 2007. He has exhibited on six continents in more than twenty one-man shows and over a hundred group shows.                 A subject of numerous reviews,articles,art books, biographies,videos and films, he has won various honours and prizes the latest of which is the 2014 Venice Biennale Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement .