El Anatsui at Art Basel Qatar
October Gallery Stand M115 in building M7.
3rd – 7th February, 2026
Aluminium and copper wire, 240 x 530 cm.
Aluminium and copper wire, 240 x 530 cm.
Over a career spanning more than five decades, El Anatsui has become one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists of our time. His sculptures employing an extraordinary range of media and many uncommon materials have investigated a broad array of different subjects. As the new century dawned, his early explorations in clay and tropical hardwoods gradually developed towards inventive, new strategies designed to repurpose various found materials: iron graters, milk-tin lids and — most famously — aluminium bottle tops. Today, El Anatsui is best known for his mesmerising metallic installations, composed of tens — if not hundreds — of thousands of individual bottle tops fastened together with copper wire. Over the past two decades, these shape-shifting sculptural forms have graced the inner and, more recently, the outer walls of numerous major art institutions around the world, such as the Royal Academy of Arts, London, the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin and the High Line, New York. His monumental work El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon, presented in three sections in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London 2023-24, received worldwide acclaim; the installation then travelled to Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai, China, as El Anatsui: After the Red Moon in 2024-25.
The presentation at Art Basel Qatar explores the artist’s innovative approach to processes and materials. The works exhibited examine the way El Anatsui has, for decades, developed surprising and novel directions that have brought about an unexpected synthesis between African and Western practices.
El Anatsui’s earlier works in wood are currently exhibited in Nigerian Modernism, a major exhibition at Tate Modern, London until 10th May, 2026. A new exhibition of the artist’s print works at the Daniel W. Dietrich II Galleries, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will open in 2026.
