Helene Love-Allotey
Head of Department
Lot 7
El Anatsui(Ghanaian, born 1944)After the Blaze, 2000
2 May 2019, 14:00 EDT
New YorkSold for US$37,575 inc. premium
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El Anatsui (Ghanaian, born 1944)
After the Blaze, 2000
signed and dated 'EL/00' (lower right of plank 37)
painted and incised wooden planks
91 x 200cm (35 13/16 x 78 3/4in).
in 43 pieces
signed and dated 'EL/00' (lower right of plank 37)
painted and incised wooden planks
91 x 200cm (35 13/16 x 78 3/4in).
in 43 pieces
Footnotes
A graduate of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, located in Kumasi, Ghana, El Anatsui is internationally known for his monumental bottlecap installations. However prior to this Anatsui worked with reclaimed wood on a much smaller scale. The present lot, 'After the Blaze', is a perfect example of this.
El began to collect disused mortars and house posts in 1980s Nsukka, Nigeria. He would then lay all the different pieces of wood on the floor and carve into them, often using a chainsaw. Although when completed, the wooden slats look organised and are each individually numbered on the reverse, they are not designed to be hung in that exact order. "With the wood, I would put numbers behind the slats serially, but these numbers were just an initial proposal. The arrangements are all just proposals, not the final say." The wooden wall hangings are thus designed to be fluid, with no formal set arrangement. In addition to this, El made an association between the adjacent, vertical hanging of the wooden strips and the narrow-strip weaving techniques of the Ewe and Asante. The bright painted sections of wood in 'After the Blaze' closely resemble the blocks of colour seen in Kente cloth.
El Anatsui's presence in the USA was cemented with the ground-breaking group exhibition 'Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition' at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York 1990 co-curated by Kinshasha Conwill and Grace Stanislaus. Most recently Anatsui has exhibited at the Haus der Kunst in Munich curated by Professor Chika Okeke-Agulu. He is also participating in the forthcoming 58th Venice Biennale, in Ghana's first pavilion.
His work can also be found in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., The Newark Museum, New Jersey, Centre Pompidou, Paris, The British Museum, London. Guggenheim, New York and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Bibliography
El Anatsui: New Worlds, (Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 2014), p.41
Susan Mullin Vogel, El Anatsui: Art and Life, (Prestel), p.37
John Picton, El Anatsui: A Sculptured History of Africa, (Saffron Books, 1998), p.85
