Gallery 304. El Anatsui
For six decades, El Anatsui has been refining a pictorial language that transcends the boundaries of culture and medium. In 1998, the artist began making metal sculptures from discarded liquor bottle tops. The material holds conceptual significance given that alcohol was one of the commodities Europeans transported to Africa in exchange for slaves. The material therefore bestows the work with a historical symbolism that, as with so much of Anatsui’s work, is as powerful as it is subtle.
To realize these metal sculptures, Anatsui works with a team of studio assistants to undergo the labor-intensive task of flattening, twisting, crushing, and then stitching the aluminum elements together with copper wire. For Rising Sea, the artist employed people throughout Nsukka, in Nigeria, to stitch the liquor bottle cap seals together with copper wire, a collective process that took nearly a year. Three large resulting panels were joined to form a single expansive surface of cascading light.
Rising Sea is one of the artist’s most recently completed pieces and one of the largest. The swath of glimmering silver at the top of the work is reminiscent of a sky that is interrupted by billowing matte white waves that nearly subsume the only dashes of color at the bottom suggestive of a city skyline. The serene visual harmony stands in contrast to the title. Rising Sea serves as a reminder, or perhaps a warning, of how nature and civilizations can be transformed in an instant. The epic scale of the work is therefore a metaphor for the enormity of climate change.