El Anatsui

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (aquired directly from the artist)

Afor is an exemplar of the large-scale sculpture that has garnered Ghanaian born artist El Anatsui international acclaim.  Made of thousands of vertical and horizontal strips of gleaming silver, red, orange, yellow, and blue, Afor cascades over the gallery wall like a large bedraggled tapestry, the light dancing across its undulating folds.  Anatsui created the work by painstakingly hammering, folding, punching and threading with copper wire thousands of bottle caps to form what might otherwise have been mistaken for sumptuous cloth. 

Anatsui's work alludes to kente cloth, a ceremonial hand woven textile that has been worn on important occasions among the Ashante and Ewe people of West Africa since the twelfth century.  Kente cloth is created by sewing differing strips of fantastically colored and patterned fabric much in the way that Anatsui has done here,  replacing the drapery with found and altered bottle caps. By utilizing the language and vocabulary of these cloths, Anatsui, a Ewe himself, has imbued a spiritual power into his objects.