El Anatsui will create the annual large-scale commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall gallery.
The Ghanaian artist is known for his large-scale sculptures, commonly tapestries made from found and scrap metal. Having spent most of his career in Nigeria, where he taught sculpture at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, becoming associated with the 1970s African craft revivalist Nsukka group (alongside Chike Aniakor, Olu Oguibe and others), Anatsui found a wider international audience exhibiting at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Cascading between two pillars in the Arsenale, Dusasa II features thousands of woven bottle tops, a material the artist has used since the 1990s, in a work over five metres high and six in length.
Critics likened Dusasa II to kente cloth, an artform Anatsui’s father, a fisherman, mastered but which the artist is quick to point out he never learned. At the 2015 edition of the biennial Anatsui was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
Other work has featured broken fragments of pottery and chipped wood but Anatsui has said he is attracted to textiles because they are ‘Always in motion. Anytime you touch something, there is bound to be a change. The idea of a sheet that you can shape and reshape. It can be on the floor, it can be up on the ceiling, it can be up on the wall, all that fluidity is behind the concept.’
More recent solo projects include La Conciergerie, Paris (2021): Triumphant Scale at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2019); Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2019); Kunstmuseum Bern (2020). He was recipient of the Charles Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2013.
Anatsui’s work is held in permanent collections around the world including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; The British Museum, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
The Tate commission will run 10 October 2023 – 14 April 2024.
