ROM highlights Anatsui's modern African art

El Anatsui, one of Africa's most acclaimed contemporary artists, has unveiled an extensive retrospective of his striking, textural artworks at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

The ROM is hosting the world premiere of El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa, which is also the Ghanaian-born, Nigeria-based artist's first solo show in Canada.

"The exhibition gives a whole picture of El's practice and promises to be an eye-opener for both those who are familiar with him and for those to whom he is new," Lisa Binder, who curated the exhibit, told reporters.

Installed at the ROM's Institute for Contemporary Culture, the El Anatsui show was organized by New York's Museum for African Art, where Binder serves as associate curator. It will be one of the inaugural exhibitions when the New York museum's new building opens in 2011, and then will continue its North American tour.

'When something is used by people, it has a history. It has a story. It has something behind it. I think that fact lends a lot of meaning to whatever you are doing with [it].' —El Anatsui

Spanning the artist's 40-year career, When I Last Wrote to You about Africa charts Anatsui's vibrant creations and evolving methods of expression, including paintings and drawings, wood sculptures scorched with heated metal rods, installation works created with found objects, and the immense, tapestry-like wall sculptures for which he has most recently won international acclaim.

Inspiration can come from anywhere, he told CBC News.

"It is difficult for me to answer [a question about inspiration] in a clean, cut-and-dried fashion. Inspiration comes from many things, everything, and I don't want to start singling them out. But as a practitioner, I want to work with lively media and processes, so maybe those are the beginnings of my inspiration."

Anatsui has been drawn to materials as varied as the wooden platters that showcase wares in African markets, discarded doors and windows, the lids of evaporated milk cans and the caps of liquor bottles.

"The medium attracts me to itself. I'm just a free traveller and I allow the medium to pull me, then I come and see. If it's interesting, then I decide to work with it," he said, noting that he prefers to work with simple materials discovered around him, and favours used items for their historical significance.

"I believe that when something is used by people, it has a history. It has a story. It has something behind it," according to the 66-year-old artist. "I think that fact lends a lot of meaning to whatever you are doing with [it]."

In his three-dimensional metal wall sculptures — vast, colourful, undulating sheets made of myriad flattened, folded, twisted or pinched caps bound together with copper wire — several themes emerged.

"These are liquor bottle caps: whisky, brandy, gin, schnapps and other things. In my part of the world, hard liquor is a very important ingredient in pouring libations [a form of prayer or religious offering]," he explained.

"How did these drinks come into Africa? They came from Europe [and at one point were] the common thread going between Africa and Europe and America. Liquor was eventually even exchanged for slaves: a bottle of drink for one slave, something like that," he said. "These bottle caps have a history behind them, a lot of significance, so that drew me to them."

The exhibition's more than 60 pieces, from public and private art collections around the globe, include a massive new 12-by-five-metre bottle-cap sculpture created specifically for the ROM, as well as two striking works on loan from Toronto theatre impresario David Mirvish: Area B, 2007 and Crumbling Wall.

El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa will end its Toronto run on Jan. 2. In addition to New York's Museum for African Art, it is slated to travel to the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, and the Denver Art Museum.