DOHA.- As the exhibition title suggests, the survey, curated by the late Okwui Enwezor, former Director of Haus der Kunst and Chika Okeke-Agulu, Professor of Art History at the Department of Art and Archeology, Princeton University, focuses on the triumphant and monumental quality of Anatsui’s sculptures. The exhibition encompasses every medium in the artist’s prodigious fifty-year career, including the signature bottle-cap series developed over the last two decades, wood sculptures and wall reliefs spanning the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, ceramic sculptures of the late 1970s, as well as drawings, prints and books.

Abdellah Karroum, Director, Mathaf, said today: “I am proud that Mathaf is hosting this important exhibition, the first major show in the Middle East for El Anatsui, now regarded as one of Africa’s greatest living artists. This exhibition also stands for the close working relationship we have enjoyed with Okwui Enwezor over many years. We are grateful for the immense legacy he has left us as an art historian and curator. We look forward to welcoming audiences in Doha for what we believe will be a boundary breaking exhibition for the region and a fitting celebration of a great artist.”

El Anatsui has consistently worked to transform the formal possibilities of African sculptural idioms and, over fifty years, he has repeatedly revised and reinvented his material and compositional techniques to astonishing effect – from the early smaller wooden reliefs with their incised markings and broken ceramic forms, to the monumental outdoor cement sculptures, and, more recently, the vast and spectacular metal wall and floor works, which blur the boundaries between sculpture, painting and assemblage.

El Anatsui generates meaning out of his material and technical process. For example, the bottle caps come from hard liquors introduced by Europeans, as currency – and thus a means of subjugation – during the era of transatlantic slavery and colonization. The process of cutting, flattening, squeezing, twisting, folding and stitching together with copper wire thousands of these bottle caps into a single work, speaks to the making of human communities out of connected individual subjectivities.

The exhibition is organized by Haus der Kunst, Munich in cooperation with Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, the Kunstmuseum Bern and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Following its showing at Mathaf, the exhibition will tour to the Kunstmuseum Bern March 13 to June 21, 2020; and then to Guggenheim Bilbao July 17 to November 1, 2020.

Prestel will publish an exhibition catalogue of 320 pages, with extensive illustrations from the artist's archive, authored by Enwezor and Okeke-Agulu.

El Anatsui
After training in sculpture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Accra from 1965-1969, El Anatsui (b. 1944, Anyako, Ghana) taught at the Specialist Training College in Winneba, Ghana. In 1975, he moved to Nigeria where he taught sculpture and design for four decades at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, becoming an emeritus professor in 2016.

A member of the Aka Circle of Exhibiting Artists and a leading figure of the Nsukka School, El Anatsui has exhibited in five continents over the last 50 years. His numerous solo exhibitions include "Wooden Wall Plaques", Asele Art Gallery, Nsukka, Nigeria (1976); "Broken Pots: Sculpture by El Anatsui," Institute of African Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka (1979); "Venovize: Ceramic Sculpture by El Anatsui", Faculty of Art and Design Gallery, Cornwall College, Redruth (1987); Gawu, Oriel Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno, Wales (2003); "Gli", Rice University Art Gallery, Houston (2010); "A Fateful Journey", National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, and The Museum of Modern Art, Hayama (2010); "Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui," Akron Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York, Des Moines Art Center, Bass Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2012- 2015) and many other exhibitions in museums, galleries and foundations.

El Anatsui has participated in major group exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1990 and 2007); the 5th Biennale in Havana (1994); the 1st Johannesburg Biennale (1995); and the biennials of Dakar (2000), Liverpool (2002), Gwangju (2004) and Marrakesh (2016); as well as the 9th Sculpture Biennial of Osaka (1998) and La Triennale, Paris (2012). He is one of the featured artists in the first Ghana National Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

Public commissions include Broken Bridge for La Triennale, Paris (Museé Galiera) 2012; Broken Bridge II, 2012-2013, presented by Friends of the High Line, New York; and Tsiatsia - Searching for Connection, 2013 on the facade of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Most recently Three Angles was installed on the facade of the Carnegie Museum for the 2018 Carnegie International, Pittsburgh.

El Anatsui has received many prestigious awards, including the Praemium Imperiale (2017); the Golden Lion for Life Work at the Venice Biennale (2015); the Audience Award at the 7th Triennale of Small Sculpture in Fellbach; and the Kansai Telecasting Prize at the Osaka Triennale (1995). He has received honorary doctorates from Harvard University and the University of Cape Town (2016) and he was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2014) and the Royal Academy of Art (2013). He won the Prince Claus Award (2009) and the 30th Anniversary Award from the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (2009), among others.

El Anatsui's work is in major public collections in Africa, Asia, North America and Europe, including the Asele Institute (Nimo); the African Studies Gallery of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (Nsukka); The British Museum (London); The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.); the Centre Pompidou (Paris); the Los Angeles County Museum (Los Angeles); the Des Moines Art Center (Des Moines); the De Young Museum (San Francisco); the Museum Kunstpalast (Dusseldorf); the Setagaya Museum (Tokyo); the National Gallery of Modern Art (Lagos); the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto); the Tate (London); the Nelson-Atkins Museum (Kansas City); the Iwalewahaus, University of Bayreuth (Bayreuth); the Jordan National Museum (Amman); the Leeum Samsung Museum (Seoul); the Brooklyn Museum (New York); The Broad (Los Angeles); the Indianapolis Museum of Art (Indianapolis); the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston); the Guggenheim Museum (Abu Dhabi) and the Saint Louis Art Museum (Saint Louis).

El Anatsui lives and works in Nsukka, Nigeria.