Now on exhibit at London’s October Gallery, Benchmarks are a testament to the richness and elegance of El Anatsui’s creative genius.
A graduate of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, El Anatsui not only believes that, as an artist, he must work ‘with whatever his environment throws up,’ he is passionately curious about the physical history of the materials themselves, the stories they contain and the journeys that bring them into his hands.
The journey countless numbers of bottle tops, several bags of which were eventually discarded by a local liquor shop and happened upon by El Anatsui, have taken along the ways of West African trade inspired his iconic and elegant bottle-top installations and hangings.
Made from thousands of aluminium bottle-tops wired together with copper, the humble materials from which the cloth-like metallic masterpieces are made are embedded with multiple cultural, historical, and socio-political histories. El Anatsui draws out and reframes the stories and journeys behind these histories with the incredible skill, mastery, and grace of a master storyteller and creative genius.
Turning his attention to the tables and smaller flats of wood on which these countless numbers of bottle tops were pounded, crushed, folded, and pierced as they journeyed and were transformed into works of art, El Anatsui has created the prints which he has, in one of his many moments of genius, entitled “Benchmarks”.
The tables and flats, that after so much pounding manifest a landscape of textured relief, were brought to the studio of Factum Arte, a team of artists, technicians and conservators based in Madrid, London, and Milan. Well known for its synergy of past, present and future techniques, Factum Arte is dedicated to digital mediation – both in the production of works for contemporary artists and in the production of facsimiles as part of a coherent approach to preservation and dissemination, and, much like El Anatsui artistically investigating the journeys and histories of local materials, pushes the boundaries between technology and craft.
At Factum Arte, the tables and flats were
3-D scanned at a very high resolution, routed onto aluminium plates and then printed through an etching press. Black ink was used to access the textural information held both in the intaglio and on the surface; others were worked upon in colour, while others still with chine collé laminates. The artist played with endless combinations and permutations of the resulting prints to create the syntheses
that he calls “Benchmarks” and are now on exhibit at October Gallery.
For one particularly direct work, coloured ink was laboriously dabbed onto dampened Japanese paper overlaying a large and highly textured tabletop, producing a detailed relief print that bears witness to many years of accumulated mark-making.
Genius at work at the interface and interactions of culture, histories, materials, science, technology, trade, media, work, art, and craft. So moving and so amazingly beautiful.
See:
“El Anatsui’s Landmark ‘Benchmark’ Prints at October Gallery” | Nicholas Forrest, BlouinArtinfo, 27 April 2017
Benchmarks: New Prints by El Anatsui | Exhibition at October Gallery, London, 6 May – 13 April 2017
Factum Arte
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