El Anatsui: “Five Decades”
By Michael Young
The multicolored shirt that Ghana-born, Nigeria-based artist El Anatsui was wearing at the launch of his first Australian solo show, “El Anatsui: Five Decades” at Sydney’s Carriageworks, clashed harshly with his multicolored monumental sculptures, which hung in elegant swags within the venue’s industrial space like shimmering medieval tapestries. While Anatsui’s works—each one made from thousands of linked bottle tops—coalesce into subtle, aesthetically satisfying color drifts, his shirt, in stark contrast, screamed for attention.
“El Anatsui: Five Decades” is, nonetheless, a remarkable survey of contemporary art by an artist who has taken the global art world by storm in recent years. In Susan Vogel’s documentary on Anatsui, Fold Crumple Crush (2011), his work has been succinctly summed up by the distinguished art critic Robert Storr as the “recycling of industrial production into something that is completely transcendental, made out of junk.”
