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拍品專文
Known for his innovative exploration of mediums and techniques, El Anatsui's artistic practice is infused with symbolic references. Having implemented wood as the focal point of his practice since the 1980s, Grandma's Cloth Series is both cohesive and interwoven, with the surface recalling the fluid quality of textiles and the narrative of tapestry. Paying homage to his family's legacy as weavers in Ghana, Grandma's Cloth Series is a brilliant palimpsest of meaning and interpretation, which unfolds through its conceptual and formal details.
Enhanced by a multifaceted web of meanings and interpretations, Anatsui's beautiful relief sculptures are layered with context both in their medium and process. "Most of my processes and media have tended to make allusions to periods or epochs in the history of Africa," Anatsui explains, "especially form the slavery days to the colonial days" (E. Anatsui quoted by A. Worth, Nsukka, January 2009, in S. Mullen Vogel, El Anatsui, Munich, 2012, p. 37). In her recent monograph, Susan Mullin Vogel explains the significance of Anatsui's use of material, citing that each of the different types of wood created an allusion to a separate culture or group of people on the African continent. Furthermore, the vertical lines separating the distinct elements poetically recall the dividing of the continent as a direct result of Colonialism. Here the process, too, imbues the work with powerful symbolism. For Anatsui, using a power saw to carve the wood transformed the artist's process into "a language of violence, of tearing, and of clawing, of dividing" (E. Anatsui quoted by D. Ogunwa, "A Man of the Earth," p. 1577, in ibid.). And while the distinct panels were worked on individually, they come together to take on a new power and complexity.
Enhanced by a multifaceted web of meanings and interpretations, Anatsui's beautiful relief sculptures are layered with context both in their medium and process. "Most of my processes and media have tended to make allusions to periods or epochs in the history of Africa," Anatsui explains, "especially form the slavery days to the colonial days" (E. Anatsui quoted by A. Worth, Nsukka, January 2009, in S. Mullen Vogel, El Anatsui, Munich, 2012, p. 37). In her recent monograph, Susan Mullin Vogel explains the significance of Anatsui's use of material, citing that each of the different types of wood created an allusion to a separate culture or group of people on the African continent. Furthermore, the vertical lines separating the distinct elements poetically recall the dividing of the continent as a direct result of Colonialism. Here the process, too, imbues the work with powerful symbolism. For Anatsui, using a power saw to carve the wood transformed the artist's process into "a language of violence, of tearing, and of clawing, of dividing" (E. Anatsui quoted by D. Ogunwa, "A Man of the Earth," p. 1577, in ibid.). And while the distinct panels were worked on individually, they come together to take on a new power and complexity.