One of the world’s most celebrated sculptors comes to New York with highlights from his acclaimed cloth series. El Anatsui’s jaw-dropping installations have provoked a frenzy of international attention in recent years, with institutions and audiences clamouring for these sumptuous, mesmerising cloths made from thousands of aluminium liquor bottle tops.

When local distilleries in Nigeria recycle each other’s bottles, the screw caps associated with each brand are discarded in the process. By collecting these materials, and laboriously sewing them together with copper wire, Anatsui’s transformative process aims to “subvert the stereotype of metal as a stiff, rigid medium and rather showing it as a soft, pliable, almost sensuous material capable of attaining immense dimensions and being adapted to specific spaces” (Anatsui 2005).

Beyond the powerful visual impact of the works, the cloths open myriad possibilities for personal response and interpretation. Referencing diverse relationships of trade, materiality, tradition and modernity between West Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Anatsui draws our attention to the human histories of the materials that surround us. Bottles of liquor, for example, were the units of currency preferred by European traders seeking to acquire slaves and ivory on the West African coast. Liquor from specially established UK distilleries, and rum, (a by-product of the Caribbean sugar plantations for which Africa had supplied the labour), was exchanged at great advantage to the European traders. Anatsui’s work gently alerts us to these histories, interlacing material and metaphor like elements within a cloth.