The Choice of El Anatsui

“Art grows out of each particular situation and I believe artists are better off working with whatever their environment throws up. I think that’s what has been happening in Africa for a long time, in fact not only in Africa but the whole world, except that maybe in the west they might have developed these ‘professional’ materials. But I don’t think that working with such prescribed materials would be very interesting to me-industrially produced colors for painting. I believe that color is inherent in everything, and it’s possible to get color from around you, and that you’re better off picking something which relates to your circumstances and your environment than going to buy a ready-made color. It’s like someone, a stranger is trying to tell you what to do, rather than you deciding what to do with what circumstances have made available to you.”


“I saw the bottle caps as relating to the history of Africa in the sense that when the earliest group of Europeans came to trade, they brought along rum originally from the West Indies that then went to Europe and finally to Africa as three legs of the triangular trip....The drink caps that I use are not made in Europe; they are all made in Nigeria, but they symbolize bringing together the histories of these two continents.” (El Anatsui)