He lived in faculty housing until his retirement, in 2011. Even now, his circumstances are modest. A friend called his two cars “disreputable-looking,” while Orji, the former assistant, described his two-story concrete residence as hardly one of the nicest in the neighborhood. “I think my house is more beautiful than Prof’s,” he reflected. “He knows where to show off and where not to show off.”
Like his bottle-cap sheets, often mischaracterized as a form of recycling, Anatsui’s austere life style can easily be taken as a high-minded statement. In fact, he lives simply for the same reason that he uses found materials: to afford himself the maximum possible freedom. Anything that might impede his creativity is out, not least his own sculptures; the walls of his home are bare. “If you feel attached to your work, it means you have a feeling you have gotten to the end,” he told me.
Anatsui’s first bottle caps were an accidental discovery. In 1998, he was walking on the outskirts of Nsukka when he found a discarded bag of loose caps along the roadside. It was an invitation. For decades, the artist had been resurrecting refuse in metamorphic sculptures, expanding the significance of everyday objects without effacing their origins. “I let the material lead me,” he said. “If it can’t say something, then it better not be made to say it.”
His process requires a great deal of patience. Anatsui didn’t know what to do with the first bottle caps he collected. Busy experimenting with other used metal—evaporated-milk cans, cassava graters—he kept them in his studio for two years before working them into a sculpture. Most were red and gold, with silver undersides and evocative brand names that changed as often as every few months. He eventually secured a regular supply from an area distillery, taking part in an active local market.
Later, Anatsui drew connections between his medium and the triangular trade that once linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas. But his first interest was in what bottle caps could do, and in what new dimensions they might open in his pursuit of flexibility and freedom. They proved an ideal material—vivid, malleable, local, abundant, and cheap.
Assisted by two former students, Anatsui started connecting the bits of metal with copper wire, as he’d previously done with can lids. There was little sign that anything significant was about to occur at the former warehouse then serving as his studio; Okafor, who worked with Anatsui on the first sheets, said that “playing” with the caps was at first a form of busywork. Her friends used to come by and laugh, asking why she wasted her time in a “dirty-looking place” surrounded by old wood and metal. But she’d learned to see art differently: “You finish making it in the dirt, and then you come out and put it in a clean place.”
Anatsui’s Adam and Eve in the new medium were “Man’s Cloth” and “Woman’s Cloth.” The “male” was composed of flattened rectangular strips from the bottle’s neck; the “female” added circular bottle tops. Doubtful whether the caps had enough tensile strength to hold together at larger sizes, Anatsui made each one only a few yards long. He had conceived the pair as a one-off experiment but discovered a sense of possibility in the material. A mesh of liquor-bottle caps wasn’t a static thing but a kind of tactile “choir,” distilling opaque, elusive flashes from a community’s life. “What I’m interested in is the fact of many hands,” he told me. “When people see work like that, they should be able to feel the presence of those people.”
In the early days, Anatsui would sometimes transport his bottle-cap sculptures in a practical way that surprised their recipients: folded in small crates or even in suitcases that he delivered himself. The first to receive such a shipment was Elisabeth Lalouschek, the artistic director at London’s October Gallery, where “Man’s Cloth” and “Woman’s Cloth” were installed in 2002. Anatsui hadn’t yet decided how to exhibit the metal sheets; in photographs he’d sent ahead, they were draped over bushes. Lalouschek installed them in their now familiar format: as wall hangings with ripples and folds, like metal tapestries.
Lalouschek had championed Anatsui’s work since the early nineties, when she saw his wooden reliefs featured in a Smithsonian documentary about contemporary Nigerian art. But the “alchemy” of these metal sheets struck her—and nearly everyone who saw them—as miraculous, a water-into-wine transformation. “It didn’t matter who walked into the gallery, whether it was a child or an ambassador or somebody else,” she said. “It affected them all in some way or other. We had entered a completely new arena.”
Major collections that had previously paid scant attention to contemporary African art took notice. The British Museum acquired “Man’s Cloth” and “Woman’s Cloth.” The following year, Anatsui exhibited an entire group of the bottle-cap sheets for a solo show at the Mostyn Gallery, in Llandudno, Wales, an exhibition that ultimately travelled to nine other venues in Europe and the United States. By 2007, Anatsui’s bottle-cap sheets were in the collections of San Francisco’s de Young Museum, Paris’s Centre Pompidou, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The bottle-cap medium dramatically exceeded Anatsui’s expectations. He devised a spectrum of new elements from the deceptively simple material, and recruited a team of part-time assistants to incorporate them into ever-larger works. “Sasa,” a twenty-eight-foot synthesis of his developing style, was his first monumental bottle-cap sculpture, and featured prominently in “Africa Remix,” a blockbuster group show that opened in 2004, in Düsseldorf, then travelled to London, Paris, Tokyo, Stockholm, and Johannesburg.
The ratification of Anatsui’s new success came at the 2007 Venice Biennale, where his bottle-cap sculptures ravished the art world’s most influential audience. For the central exhibition in the Arsenale, once a medieval shipyard, he designed two monumental commissions. “Dusasa II,” a twenty-four-foot sheet that hung between pillars at the end of a long hallway, served as its culminating work. (The Metropolitan Museum swiftly acquired the sculpture, and recently showcased it in the autobiographical exhibition “Making the Met, 1870–2020.”) A third sculpture, “Fresh and Fading Memories,” fell like enchanted scaffolding over the fifteenth-century Palazzo Fortuny. It was the first of many flirtations with architecture, a white-gold sheet with colorful grid lines that bunched over the heavy wooden doors like a rising curtain. Careful tears disclosed the brick of the underlying façade; a curator told the artist that the work looked as if it might have been there for a hundred years.
In a highly factionalized art world, Anatsui found universal acclaim. To formalists, he was an Abstract Expressionist who worked in aluminum refuse; to the postmodern and the post-colonially minded, a maverick interrogator of consumption and commerce; to Old Guard Africanists, a renewer of ancient craft traditions. To most, his work was simply beautiful, with transcendent aspirations rare in the self-reflexive context of contemporary art. As it turned out, the unfixed form wasn’t just a way of sculpting. It was the principle of a career that had opened itself to the world without sacrificing its integrity.
In 1944, thirteen years before Ghana declared independence from Great Britain, El Anatsui was born in the Gold Coast lagoon village of Anyako. He warned me not to go looking for his birth name. “El” was a later adoption, which he chose in his mid-twenties from a list of words for the divine. His father was a fisherman and a weaver, but Anatsui, the youngest of thirty-two children, learned neither trade. After his mother died, the family shipped him across the lagoon to his uncle, a Presbyterian minister. Anatsui grew up in a mission house, learning the discipline that characterizes his life as an artist: “You do what is necessary—only—and don’t bother with extravagance.”
He discovered an aptitude for drawing and enrolled in art school, without his family’s encouragement. It was seven years after independence, and President Kwame Nkrumah spoke urgently about the need to assert an “African Personality.” It had yet to manifest at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, in Kumasi, where Anatsui studied a curriculum imported from Goldsmiths, University of London. He chose sculpture for its novelty, and wrote a thesis on chieftaincy regalia, prefiguring a talent for sculpture that effortlessly projects authority. He impressed his instructors, but questioned their emphasis on imported materials like plaster of Paris, and looked beyond the classroom for ways to “indigenize his aesthetic.”
After graduation, he took a teaching position in the coastal town of Winneba, and started buying circular wooden trays that were used to display goods in local markets. He added metal inlays around the edges and used a heated rod to emboss them with symbols called adinkra. Often found on Ghanaian textiles, adinkra represent proverbs and adages. In “Triumphant Scale,” mounted on the wall like icons, they seemed to offer metaphysical sustenance in lieu of fish and beans.
The trays inaugurated a career-long commitment to making work from “whatever the environment throws up,” an embrace of the local that was also a pragmatic choice. Wherever Anatsui found himself, material would be readily available. In 1975, he left Ghana to teach at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, which had opened fifteen years earlier, and was the nation’s first university independent of any European institution. U.N.N., once among Nigeria’s leading schools, had suffered during the country’s civil war, when the majority-Igbo southeastern region attempted to secede as the Republic of Biafra. When Anatsui arrived, bullet holes still riddled the campus.
Under the debris, a revival was stirring, as Igbo artists and intellectuals unwelcome elsewhere in the country flocked to U.N.N. Among them were Chinua Achebe, who founded his magazine Okike at the university, and Uche Okeke, one of Nigeria’s leading painters, who had begun to fuse European modernism with indigenous design traditions in a movement called “natural synthesis.” Achebe opened one of Anatsui’s first solo exhibitions; Okeke was the chair of his department. Before long, the Ghanaian émigré was embedded in the so-called Nsukka school, which took inspiration from uli, a tradition of body- and mural-painting among Igbo women that is characterized by spare, linear designs.
By immersing himself in local styles, Anatsui began to forge his own deeply hybridized notion of the “African Personality.” He studied a panoply of sign systems—including the Bamum script from Cameroon, Yoruba Aroko symbols, and a locally indigenous system known as nsibidi, as well as uli and adinkra—growing obsessed with the esoteric scripts of a continent often depicted as devoid of writing traditions. “Rather than feeling that there wasn’t any writing tradition in Africa, we had Tower of Babel syndrome,” he recalled discovering. He was similarly fascinated by Nigeria’s national museums and archeological sites, evidence of a patrimony more intact, as he saw it, than Ghana’s. History and its fractures, from the vanishing of ancient societies to the instability of post-colonial nations, became central to his subsequent works in clay and wood.
