El Anatsui valuation
Stitches thousands of flattened bottle tops into shimmering metal hangings that fold like cloth.
El Anatsui was born at Anyako in the Volta Region of Ghana in 1944, the youngest of his father's thirty-two children, and studied at the College of Art in Kumasi, now part of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, graduating in 1968.
What a work by El Anatsui is worth
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Bio
El Anatsui was born at Anyako in the Volta Region of Ghana in 1944, the youngest of his father's thirty-two children, and studied at the College of Art in Kumasi, now part of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, graduating in 1968. In 1975 he joined the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, where he taught for more than thirty years and became professor of sculpture. His early work, carved and burnt wooden reliefs and ceramics, drew on Ghanaian symbols and the idea of retrieving suppressed culture. From the late 1990s he made his best-known works, vast hangings of aluminium liquor-bottle caps and seals, flattened and joined with copper wire by teams of assistants, which can take a different shape each time they are installed. He showed at the Venice Biennale in 2007, received its Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in 2015, and filled Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2023.
The large metal hangings are rare on the market and many are in museums; smaller metal works, the earlier wooden reliefs, ceramics, prints and works on paper appear more often. Because each hanging can be installed in more than one form, the artist's guidance on installation is part of the work. A provenance through his galleries is usual.
Kumasi, Nsukka and the Turbine Hall
Behind the Red Moon, his Hyundai Commission for the Turbine Hall in 2023, was made from thousands of metal bottle tops in three monumental parts.
His retrospective When I Last Wrote to You about Africa opened at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2010 and toured North America for three years, and in 2023 Time named him among the hundred most influential people in the world.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
