© 2024 WWB Holdings, LLC. All rights reserved
El Anatsui creates colorful pieces, like the 2012 work above, from salvaged bottle caps. His upcoming installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art will use metal security seals. hardware notching machine
Visitors to the Philadelphia Museum of Art this fall will notice hundreds of sculptures hanging from the ceiling as they move between floors.
The museum is preparing to unveil a new installation from the Ghanian artist El Anatsui, known for flattening and fusing salvaged bottle caps into works of art. For his latest piece, he used the metal security seals hung around bottle necks to create roughly 200 human forms that will "float" over the Williams Forum, the space that connects the museum's ground level to its upper floors. The structure will span the entire length of the forum's ceiling at 27 by 40 feet.
It will open Friday, Oct. 11, and remain on display for two years. During the installation's final months of display in 2026, the museum also will open an exhibition of El Anatsui's print and paper works in its first-floor Daniel W. Dietrich II Galleries.
Thanks to the forum's staircases, visitors will be able to view the installation from different heights and angles. From certain perspectives, the museum said, the sculpted bodies will "appear to come together in a globe-like shape." The bottle seals, thinner than the caps El Anatsui typically uses, also will create more porous figures.
"The intricate interplay between opacity and transparency generates an ambiguous optical illusion," he said in a release. "Navigating this multi-layered work demands the use of all senses — sight, sound, and touch — thus challenging us to move beyond conventional frameworks."Provided image/El Anatsui; Jack Shainman Gallery El Anatsui's 2011 piece 'Stressed World,' above was woven together with copper wire and flattened aluminum.
El Anatsui's 2011 piece 'Stressed World,' above was woven together with copper wire and flattened aluminum.
El Anatsui has spent much of his career working with salvaged materials. In the 1970s, he collected wooden display trays from Ghanian markets and used a hot iron to press graphic symbols into the grain. He then switched to ceramics for his "Broken Pots" series, featuring splintered clay vessels. In the late 1990s, he started collecting aluminum, mostly caps from Nigerian liquor bottles, and transforming the discarded scraps into colorful, fluid mosaic pieces stitched together with copper wire. His new work, commissioned specifically for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, likewise will use copper rings.
"What some might consider mundane, defunct, or even ugly can be transformed through reconfiguration, reimagination, and re-embrace," El Anatsui added.
Follow Kristin & PhillyVoice on Twitter: @kristin_hunt | @thePhillyVoice Like us on Facebook: PhillyVoice Have a news tip? Let us know.
gloves box © 2024 WWB Holdings, LLC. All rights reserved