BROOKLYN, NY.- The critically acclaimed exhibition, Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui, which has attracted enthusiastic crowds to the Brooklyn Museum since its February 8 opening, has been extended for an additional two weeks and is now slated to close August 18, 2013.

The exhibition features 30 primarily large-scale works in metal and wood that transform appropriated objects into site-specific sculptures. Anatsui converts found materials into a new type of media that lies between the bounds of sculpture and painting. In so doing, he combines aesthetic traditions from his birth country of Ghana, his home in Nsukka, Nigeria, and the global history of abstraction. Working with discarded metal bottle caps collected from a liquor distillery in Nsukka, Anatsui drastically modifies this otherwise unremarkable, everyday material--cutting, flattening, twisting, and connecting small individual pieces of metal in order to create vast undulating sheets.

Included in the exhibition are twelve recent monumental wall and floor sculptures, including Gli (Wall), 2010, which has transformed the Museum rotunda with shimmering veils of these sheets, as well Black Block, 2010, recently acquired by the Brooklyn Museum for the permanent collection. The exhibition also includes wall reliefs and sculptures of interchangeable wooden pieces.

Born in Anyako, Ghana, in 1944, El Anatsui has lived and worked in Nigeria since 1978. After receiving a BA and postgraduate degree from the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, he was for many years a professor of fine arts at the University of Nigeria. His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the de Young Museum, among many others.

Gravity and Grace was organized by Interim Chief Curator Ellen Rudolph, Akron Museum of Art. The exhibition has been adapted and organized for the Brooklyn presentation by Kevin Dumouchelle, Associate Curator of the Arts of Africa and the Pacific Islands. The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication by Susan Vogel, curator, documentary filmmaker, and former professor of African art and architecture at Columbia University.