“El Anatsui: Five Decades” at Carriageworks in Sydney is the first major exhibition of Ghanaian artist El Anatsui in Australia. Presented as part of the Sydney Festival, the show marks the first Schwartz Carriageworks Project.Born in 1944 in Ghana and currently working in Nsukka, Nigeria, Anatsui is best known for creating large-scale installations using repurposed everyday materials such as wood, aluminum, printing plates, tin boxes and liquor bottle tops.In his quest to free himself from the confines of Western art and discover the creative and artistic heritage and legacy of his own culture, Anatsui developed a mode of expression that defies categorization, freeing the viewer from the constraints of pre-existing frameworks.Freedom is the central motivating of Anatsui’s practice – freedom as an abstract conceptual construct, a concrete mode of creation, and a catalyst for dialogue. His wide-ranging perception and understanding of freedom and its associations and implications is imbued into every work he creates.“El Anatsui: Five Decades” showcases the breadth and depth of Anatsui’s creative vision through an amazing selection of more than 30 works from the 1970s to the current day, including ceramics, drawings, sculptures, and woodcarvings.But although the exhibition spans his entire career, it is the artist’s signature tapestry-like sculptures, constructed using aluminum bottle-caps and foil bottleneck wrappers, which have come to define his practice, that steal the show.Freely mountable in a range of different positions from the floor to the wall, Anatsui’s bottle-top and foil label assemblages embody characteristics of painting, sculpture, mosaic, tapestry, and sculpture, defying categorization or classification.It is these works reveal the genius of Anatsui’s singular and visionary practice: his ability to create works that are at once disengaged from pre-existing structures and frameworks, yet can still evoke associations and emotions in the viewer without dictating what they should be.He achieves this feat by combining carefully chosen aspects of the shape, texture, form, and color of his chosen materials with fragments of familiar images and motifs, to craft incredible assemblages that activate and engage with the viewer’s subconscious and peripheral senses.Every one of the bottle tops he uses in his works was discarded by someone – a unique individual with a story all their own. Anatsui harnesses the collective energies of these people and encapsulates them within a woven fabric, elevating them to the status of collaborators and contributors.Anatsui’s work expresses the ideals of one person within the context of the human condition. The contrasting dichotomies of his practice express the paradoxes of contemporary society. “Human life is constantly in a state of change... I want my work to replicate that experience,” he says.“El Anatsui: Five Decades” is at Carriageworks in Sydney until March 6, 2016.Click the slideshow to see images of the exhibition
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