At the 56th Venice Biennale, where Anatsui was awarded the Golden Lion for
Lifetime Achievement, the show’s curator Okwui Enwezor, described him as
Africa’s most significant living artist praising “the originality of Anatsui’s artistic
vision, his long-term commitment to formal innovation, and his assertion through
his work of the place of Africa’s artistic and cultural traditions in international
contemporary art”Link.
Anatsui’s famed metal wall sculptures are made from bottle-tops that are pierced
and crushed, by a team of assistants, on work benches. These benches are what
Anatsui, in conjunction with Factum Arte, the Madrid-based team of conservators,
have developed into the prints that constitute much of Benchmarks.
Mike Ward, director of the intaglio studio at Factum Arte, explained that “after
3D scanning these wooden pieces and using the textural information to make
routed aluminium intaglio plates they became versatile source material with
which to try anything and everything”.
One such successful try is Eclipse Suite, a collection of 13 pieces named after the
13 cycles of the moon.
A large number of prints were laid on the floor for Anatsui to arrange in a format
of his choosing “El chose to concentrate on the recto and verso images of thenear circular distressed wooden tray which he overlapped and allowed to enter
and exit from the edges. This was the beginning of the idea of eclipses”.