Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui at the Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum presents the first solo exhibition in a New York museum by the artist El Anatsui.

Anatsui converts found materials into a new type of media that lies between the bounds of sculpture and painting. In so doing, he combines aesthetic traditions from his birth country Ghana, his home in Nsukka, Nigeria, and the global history of abstraction. His works can take on radically new shapes with each installation. Anatsui gives curators and designers the opportunity to install his art in ways that make use of their particular exhibition space, highlighting the intricacy of each piece.

Included in the exhibition are twelve recent monumental wall and floor sculptures, including Gli (Wall), 2010, and  Earth’s Skin, 2009, which are widely considered to represent the apex of Anatsui’s career. The metal wall works, created with bottle caps from a distillery in Nsukka, are laboriously pieced together to form monumental hangings that reveal a shimmering and enticing array of colors, forms, and textures. Anatsui is captivated by the history of use that such materials, whose travels reflect the artist’s own nomadic background, retain.

Museum Hours: Wednesday and Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Thursday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; first Saturday of each month, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.