EL ANATSUI: 'Go Back and Pick'
9 October – 29 November, 2025.
Tropical hardwood and tempera, 244 x 244 cm.
Photos: Jonathan Greet
Tropical hardwood and tempera, 148 x 335 cm.
El Anatsui’s internationally renowned sculptural experiments continue to challenge the way we look at sculpture today. Best known, during the first two decades of the 21st century, for his sumptuous, large-scale tapestries composed of recycled aluminium bottle tops, Anatsui here returns to his original and primary material of wood. ‘Go Back and Pick’ presents a brand-new series of wall-hanging sculptures, which develop from and extend beyond the planar wooden reliefs central to his practice in the 1980s and 90s.
To understand Anatsui’s extraordinary creative trajectory, one must consider the broader historical context of the Sankofa (go-back-and-pick) movement in post-Independence Ghana. When Anatsui, in 1969, graduated from Ghana’s premier College of Art, KNUST in Kumasi, its teaching programme reflected a curriculum primarily designed for use in British art schools, and took no account of indigenous arts traditions. Recognising the need for a fresh visual language capable of responding to the vibrant changes occurring locally, the Ghanaian doctrine of Sankofa argued for the necessity of returning to African arts and sculptural traditions for inspiration. Leaving western media aside, Anatsui’s early sculptural experiments used hand crafted wooden trays onto which he burned patterns and symbols found in Ghanaian sources such as Kente and Adinkra fabrics. His decision to step beyond his westernised art training sparked what he later called the ‘indigenisation of my practice.’
Leaving Ghana, in 1975, to take up a teaching post in Nsukka, Nigeria, Anatsui was surrounded by a creative group of artists who were also delving back to explore their own Nigerian traditions, historically different to his own. These multi-cultural influences revitalised his energies, and, for several years he concentrated on clay as his main medium. However, in 1980, while using a chainsaw during a residency in America, a moment of inspirational vision saw him return to wood as his primary material. From then until the new century dawned, Anatsui used power tools to cut, slice and carve into a range of wooden forms, developing a dazzling variety of new sculptural formats: from hanging wooden panels and weathered mortars masquerading as figures to evocative installations of scorched driftwood and haunting wall hangings of salvaged timber from ruined homes. Pushing the boundaries of his chosen material further, Anatsui began to pick out design elements using natural earth and primary colours in tempera and acrylic paints. This fusion of pictographic colour and sculptural design elements came to define Anatsui’s signature style. Even after 2002, when his attention became absorbed by the runaway success of his metal wall hangings, first exhibited at October Gallery in London, El Anatsui continued in the secluded space of his Nsukka (and now Tema) studio, to create sculptural reliefs in wood.
‘Go Back and Pick’ highlights Anatsui’s most recent wooden panel works, which mine this deep and productive seam. From the outset, Anatsui has always insisted on the broad range of freedoms discoverable within these sculptures. The modular nature and flexibility of the panel pieces allow for a range of spatially adaptive reconfigurations to the hanging sequence. Rather than having a fixed and final form, each panel piece can be rearranged to offer alternative combinations. As scholars Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu note, the ‘form-shape and surface colour compositions are potentially free to be manipulated … uninhibited by whatever might have been the artist’s original composition.’
