El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale, the largest ever survey mounted of the work of the acclaimed artist El Anatsui (born 1994, Ghana) perhaps Africa’s most prominent living artist, will go on show at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art from 1 October 2019 – 31 January 2020.

image Left: El Anatsui (born 1994, Ghana) / Right: Logoligi Logarithm / Courtesy of Mathaf

As the exhibition title suggests, the survey, curated by the late Okwui Enwezor, former Director of Haus der Kunst and Chika Okeke-Agulu, Professor of Art History at the Department of Art and Archeology, Princeton University, will focus on the triumphant and monumental quality of Anatsui’s sculptures. The exhibition will encompass every medium in the artist’s prodigious fifty year career, including the signature bottle-cap series developed over the last two decades, wood sculptures and wall reliefs spanning the mid-1970s to the late 1990s; ceramic sculptures of the late 1970s, as well as drawings, prints and books.

Abdellah Karroum, Director, Mathaf, said: “I am proud that Mathaf is hosting this important exhibition, the first major show in the Middle East for El Anatsui, now regarded as one of Africa’s greatest living artists. This exhibition also stands for the close working relationship we have enjoyed with Okwui Enwezor over many years. We are grateful for the immense legacy he has left us as an art historian and curator. We look forward to welcoming audiences in Doha for what we believe will be a boundary breaking exhibition for the region and a fitting celebration of a great artist.“

El Anatsui has consistently worked to transform the formal possibilities of African sculptural idioms and, over fifty years, he has repeatedly revised and reinvented his material and compositional techniques to astonishing effect - from the early smaller wooden reliefs with their incised markings and broken ceramic forms, to the monumental outdoor cement sculptures, and, more recently, the vast and spectacular metal wall and floor works, which blur the boundaries between sculpture, painting and assemblage.

El Anatsui generates meaning out of his material and technical process. For example, the bottle caps come from hard liquors introduced by Europeans, as currency - and thus a means of subjugation - during the era of transatlantic slavery and colonization. The process of cutting, flattening, squeezing, twisting, folding and stitching together with copper wire thousands of these bottle caps into a single work, speaks to the making of human communities out of connected individual subjectivities.

image El Anatsui, Black Block / Courtesy of Mathaf

image El Anatsui, In the World But Don’t Know the World / Courtesy of Mathaf

image El Anatsui, Rising Sea / Courtesy of Mathaf

image El Anatsui, Rising Sea / Courtesy of Mathaf

image El Anatsui, Tiled Flower Garden / Courtesy of Mathaf

image El Anatsui, Tiled Flower Garden / Courtesy of Mathaf

image El Anatsui, Gravity and Grace / Courtesy of Mathaf

The exhibition is organized by Haus der Kunst, Munich in cooperation with Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, the Kunstmuseum Bern and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Following its showing at Mathaf, the exhibition will tour to the Kunstmuseum Bern March 13 to June 21, 2020; and then to Guggenheim Bilbao July 17 to November 1, 2020.


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