Author Description

Sculptor El Anatsui is one of Africa's most significant contemporary artists whose work maintains an ambitious breadth of vision that consistently speaks to the reality of Africa's existence. To this reality, he adds further layers of meaning, fed by his awareness of the culture and history of the African continent, an awareness evolved over years of restless intellectual and artistic enquiry. There is an allusion to a preoccupation with both tradition and change in his work, along with a strong sensitivity to his material's physical expressiveness and their cultural implications as he employs common idioms and grammar of contemporary Western art at the same time as he actively undermines them by introducing ideas, techniques and material from never yet subjugated areas that lie far beyond the pale of Western art. This catalogue accomanied, ASI, an exhibition of El Anatsui's sculpture at David Krut Projects, New York in November of 2006.