Phillips to Offer El Anatsui’s
“Affirmation”
The work is part of A Vision in Red, a collection offered at Phillips, London’s 20th
Century & Contemporary Art Evening & Day Sales. The auctions will take place on
February 13 and 14.
As part of its 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening & Day Sales this February,
Phillips, London, is pleased to present A Vision in Red: Property from a Private Swiss
Collection comprising six energetic works, at the center of which is El Anatsui’s
“Affirmation” (2014), a wall-mounted installation made up of myriad aluminum bottle
caps woven into one vast, shimmering curtain. Also on offer are two lots by Louise
Bourgeois, a mixed-media painting by Ghada Amer, a larger-than-life print by Halim Al
Karim, and a stainless steel construction by Subodh Gupta.
Ever since his 1999 discovery of a bag full of metal seals from African liquor bottles,
Anatsui has continually worked on wall assemblages made of bottle caps, crushing the
found elements into circles or cutting them into strips, subsequently sewing the parts
together to form monumental tapestries. As quoted in Erika Gee’s Educator’s Guide for
the Museum of African Art’s 2010 exhibition El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About
Africa, the artist explains the meaning of his preferred material.
When I first found the bag of bottle tops, I thought of the objects as links between Africa and
Europe. European traders introduced the bottle tops, and alcohol was used in the trans-Atlantic
slave trade. Europeans made rum in the West Indies, took it to Liverpool, and then sent it back
to Africa. For me, the bottle caps have a strong reference to the history of Africa.
As part of the artist’s Theory of Se series, “Affirmation” touches on numerous references pertaining to Anatsui’s cultural
background, namely delving into the notion of “Se”, which signifies fate, fortune, or destiny in the Ewe language. “Se”
overarches the artistic intention with which Anatsui created the present work and its counterparts; within this theme,
the artist explored three states of mind: affirmation, intimation, and revelation.
Accompanying Anatsui’s “Affirmation” in A Vision in Red are five works in the Phillips February Day Sale: two pieces by
the late Louise Bourgeois, “Untitled” (2006) and “Spiral” (2010), Ghada Amer’s “In Red and pale-RFGA” (2013), Halim Al
Karim’s “Untitled 1 (from the King’s Harem series)” (2008), and “Bucket” by Subodh Gupta (2007). Together, the works
from A Vision in Red compose an immersive picture of complex materiality and vibrant color, united by their defining
tonal dynamism.