El Anatsui

(Ghanaian, born 1944)

Mammoth Crowd Series I 56 x 136 x 2cm (22 1/16 x 53 9/16 x 13/16in). (14 panels)

Footnotes

Today, El Anatsui is an internationally celebrated artist. His works have graced the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian in Washington, the Hayward Gallery in London, the British Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and most recently the Haus der Kunst in Munich. He has twice been selected to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, and was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion award in 2015.

The accolades are well deserved. It is difficult to think of a more versatile artist. Over his long career, El Anatsui has worked in terracotta, wood, print, textiles, and of course with his famous bottle tops!

The present lot, Mammoth Crowd Series I, belongs to an early body of wooden plank hangings. The inspiration behind these is grounded in his experience of studying art in the years following Ghana's independence. El Anatsui was one of a group of artists to advocate the need for a new aesthetic, one that was not grounded in the design principles of European colonizers. He began to investigate the art form, uli, an ancient decorative scheme traditionally practiced by Igbo communities. It consists primarily of abstracted animal, plant and cosmic forms. At the same time, he began to incorporate nsibidi symbols into his work, a pictographic script employed by the Efik and north-eastern Igbo.

Born in Anyako in 1944, Anatsui's formative years were shaped by his experience of British colonial rule. The accepted histories of the African continent at that time were primarily written by European outsiders. Anatsui believed that this had led to great distortions, and sought to redress the problem through his art. His research into various writing systems and codes was an attempt to enter into the minds of the societies that developed them, providing alternative insider narratives.

Mammoth Crowd Series I is composed from wooden planks adorned with uli and nsibidi symbols, incised with a power saw and blow torch. The scorched, jagged fragments of wood are a powerful metaphor for the cultural devastation of colonialism and its legacy.

Bibliography
C. Okeke, 'The Quest: from Zaria of Nsukka, a story from Nigeria', in Whitechapel Gallery exhibition catalogue, Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, (London, 1995), pp.58-59.
Y. Kawaguchi, 'A Fateful Journey', in El Anatsui: A Sculpted History of Africa, (London, 1995), p.59.
C. Okeke, 'Mark-making and El Anatsui's Reinvention of Sculpture', in L. Binder ed., El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa, (New York, 2010).