El Anatsui

(Ghanaian, born 1944)

Wastepaper Basket
2003

Footnotes

Provenance
The October Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2007

Exhibited
Llandudno, Oriel Mostyn Gallery; Sligo, Model Arts and Niland Gallery; Oldham, Gallery Oldham; London, The October Gallery; Nottingham, Djanogly Art Gallery; Gainesville, Harn Museum of Art; Hanover, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; Los Angeles, Fowler Museum at UCLA; Tucson, The University of Arizona Museum of Art; Washington D.C., National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, El Anatsui - Gawu, 2004 - 2008
Brussels, Villa Empain- Fondation Boghosssian, Melancholia, 2018




With its exquisite attention to detail and remarkable craftsmanship, El Anatsui's Wastepaper Basket (2003) is a rare sculpture from a very limited series by an artist of truly global appeal. The Ghanaian-born Anatsui has become a figurehead for the international, post-colonial discourse on contemporary art in the Twenty-First century, with works held in such distinguished institutions as the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Tate collection, London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and the Osaka Foundation for Culture in Japan.

Making metallic elements appear supple and fabric-like, Anatsui has produced a work of captivating intricacy and theatre with a materiality that is so characteristic of the tapestries that the artist has created for large-scale public commissions. Stitching together sheet metal printed with the handwriting, margins and layouts of letters, documents and newspapers, Wastepaper Basket is a characterful work that inverts the scale and substance of its motif. Poetically accumulated and dispersed in the space around the body of the work, it stands as a universal symbol of discarded thoughts, paperwork and plans, assembled and bound into a hard metallic shell whose ripples and folds beautifully evoke the fragility of paper, or the overlapping joints of a suit of armour.

Combining traditional African techniques with the themes and aesthetics of the Western canon, Anatsui has stood at the forefront of a global genre of art that has transcended history and culture. Evoking the burnished surfaces of Byzantine mosaics and the freestanding aura of an archaic totem, the present work entertains a monumentality that is suffused with the rawness of its material.

Born in Ghana in 1944, Anatsui has enjoyed a multitude of groundbreaking exhibitions and awards over the course of his career that have assured his value as an international phenomenon. From his critically lauded inclusion in the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 to his receipt of the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 56th edition in 2015 he has been that rare figure who unites audiences, critics and collectors alike. Furthermore, his tapestry Tsiatsia – Searching for Connection was famously draped over the façade of the Royal Academy of Art in London for the institution's Summer Exhibition in 2013, a unique honour which led to Anatsui being subsequently elected to the post of an honorary Royal Academician. He has seen a meteoric rise of global importance in recent years, establishing himself as a culturally significant and historically pivotal artist, not only in Europe and America, but notably in Asia where he was awarded the highest artistic honour in Japan, the Praemium Imperiale Award for Sculpture, in 2017.

This work, presented around the world in the artist's solo exhibition Gawu – touring the U.K. and the U.S.A. between 2003 and 2008, before closing at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C. – Wastepaper Basket wonderfully abbreviates the tenets of Anatsui's practice, using found materials to construct a sculpture whose very fabric is the fragments and detritus of life in Nigeria, where the artist's studio is located. Having previously used wood, railway sleepers, bottle tops, iron nails and printing plates as his media, the present work, handmade in aluminium and bound in copper wire, is a poetic object that poses a tension between the work of art and the detritus of the everyday.

In a piece that playfully toys with the seriousness of art-making yet speaks to the process of ideas blossoming and fading, the present work holds an air of astute poignancy about the rigours of being an artist. Wastepaper Basket stands as a work of sublime sculpture, elevating the banal and overlooked to the heights of the art object, as the artist has done throughout his career with bottle caps and tins alike. Constructed out of hundreds of pieces of sculpture in their own right, each individual fragment of aluminium crafted and shaped with a specific purpose, Anatsui has constructed a totemic monolith that is a drama of objects and surfaces when viewed up close, and represents an outstanding work by one of the leading figures of Twenty-First Century Art.