Beschreibung:

El Anatsui (Ghanaian, born 1944)Uli, circa early 1980s carved and incised wooden panels 96 x 287 x 2.5cm (37 13/16 x 113 x1in). (in 11 pieces)FootnotesProvenance Gifted by the artist; By descent to the present owner. Born in Ghana in 1944, El Anatsui has achieved international success as one of the most highly acclaimed artists working globally today. While perhaps best known for the distinctive cloth-like forms he creates from interlinked bottle caps, wooden sculpture remains at the heart of the artist's practice. The present work, Uli, exemplifies the multi-panelled wooden pieces that El Anatsui has created throughout his career. He typically carves into the surface of the wood to create decorative patterns which extend across the individual panels to produce a unified design. El Anatsui recalls that he created the present work in the 1980s '[a]fter meeting and interacting with Uche Okeke and imbibing some uli aesthetic strategies'. Uche Okeke was a pioneer of Nigerian art who founded the influential Zaria Art Society in the 1970s with fellow students at the Nigeria College of Arts, Science and Technology including Yusuf Grillo, Bruce Onobrakpeya and Demas Nwoko (all artists represented in the present auction). The society championed the fundamental role of indigenous African themes, techniques, and materials in the construction of a contemporary Nigerian aesthetic following the country's independence from colonial rule in the 1960s. Okeke was preoccupied with the uli aesthetic of the Igbo people from southeast Nigeria. Traditionally practiced by female members of the community and employed as a decorative scheme for murals or stained onto the body, uli design is characterised by curvilinear and abstracted forms which are frequently asymmetrical and painted in a spontaneous manner. Ukeke asserted his belief that engagement with this traditional form of mark-making 'will help liberate as well as enrich contemporary thinking in Africa. One can only be oneself, I think, through deeper understanding of one's local traditions' (Uche Okeke 2019 [1982]: p. 25). In the present work, El Anatsui interprets the uli aesthetic championed by Ukeke through the incised design on the surface of the wooden panels. A rounded form is created using intersecting lines arranged at different angles and with different degrees of curvature. The larger circle encompasses a smaller, heavily incised circle, giving the impression of a biomorphic organic form. A broken line sweeps across the top of the two passages of incisions to unite the design of the work and create a sense of fluidity across the individual panels. The design is both evocative of uli decorative traditions and El Anatsui's own distinctive language of mark-making exemplified in his other wooden sculptures. This reimagining of the indigenous Nigerian aesthetic within his own practice evidences the Ghanian artist's interest in drawing links between contemporary artmaking and the canon of West-African art history. Awarded the Venice Biennale Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2015, El Anatsui has exhibited his works widely in prestigious institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Hayward Gallery in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. In 2019, he received his largest retrospective to date at Munich's Haus der Kunst. Bibliography Uche Okeke Art in Development – A Nigerian Perspective (Germany, 2019 [1982]).