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El Anatsui's work

Gli(Wall),2010

The artist's role here is to explore the neglected everyday objects and materials, then represent them in an innovative way to the public by emphasizing the object's properties or showing them in an unusually large scale. Through these creative forms of art, the artist temps to attract the public’s attention to these neglected objects and materials, and at the same time, to communicate specific symbolic meanings expressed by them in an effective way.

The artwork, mostly in a relatively big scale, or we can say in a big "group", reminds people of the existence of objects they are so familiar with that they probably will ignore for most of the time: Strips of wood, wasted paper and plates, lids of milk bottles and so on. Such common materials are put one next to another into a large group in the form as a sculpture. In this way, they are made to embody a new meaning given by the artist, and serve as a vehicle to communicate with the viewers visually about a particular message.

Anatsui started to get into the historical African art as an “engaged outsider”, and gradually his interest and focus went into the innovative use of local materials. So most of his work is abstract and conceptual so as to reveal his interesting ideas. In the showcase there is artwork dealing with the artist’s creative interpretation about an ordinary object and exploration of expressing a concept with a particular type of material. But both of these go toward the main theme of his work-reflecting the African history. His materials used are accessible objects in the local place (Nigeria), therefore viewers from other countries or cultures can at the same time get to know more about the people’s life here on the vast and mysterious continent.