Lot 41*
El Anatsui(Ghanaian, born 1944)At the Ancestors' Conference 73.5 x 150 x 7.5cm (28 15/16 x 59 1/16 x 2 15/16in).
28 February 2018, 17:00 GMT
London, New Bond StreetSold for £47,500 inc. premium
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El Anatsui (Ghanaian, born 1944)
At the Ancestors' Conference
initialed and dated 'EL 95'
okpeye wood
73.5 x 150 x 7.5cm (28 15/16 x 59 1/16 x 2 15/16in).
(13 pieces)
initialed and dated 'EL 95'
okpeye wood
73.5 x 150 x 7.5cm (28 15/16 x 59 1/16 x 2 15/16in).
(13 pieces)
Footnotes
Provenance
A private collection, Lagos.
This lot belongs to the Ancestor series, a group of figurative sculptures the artist executed in 1995. One of the larger pieces, titled The Ancestors Converged Again, is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art, Washington. This and another work from the same series, At the Ancestor's Conference II, are illustrated Picton's text, El Anatsui: A Sculpted History of Africa, (London, 1998) pp.46-49.
The Ancestor works featured in El Anatsui's 1995 show at the October Gallery in London, one of his first solo exhibitions outside of Africa. He had been creating wall reliefs from carved wooden planks from the early 1980s. The sculptures became increasingly complex and sophisticated over the next decade, reaching a peak in the mid 90s. The current lot is composed from 13 wooden posts and branches cut from a variety of trees. Each pole has been carved with a face, and painted with bands of colour to represent the kente cloth of traditional Ghanaian dress.
Bibliography
J. Picton ed., El Anatsui: A Sculpted History of Africa, (London, 1998) pp.46-49.
