El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale,’ the first solo exhibition of acclaimed Ghanaian artist El Anatsui, opened yesterday at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Education City.
A first-of-its-kind in the Middle East, this major exhibition is the largest ever survey mounted of the work of Anatsui, regarded as one of Africa’s greatest living artists.
HE Sheikh Hassan bin Mohamed bin Ali al-Thani officially opened the show in the presence of Qatar Museums acting CEO Ahmad al-Namla and a number of VIP guests.
“This exhibition also stands for the close working relationship we have enjoyed with Okwui Enwezor over many years. We are grateful for the immense legacy he has left us as an art historian and curator,” Mathaf director Abdellah Karroum said in a press statement.
“We look forward to welcoming audiences in Doha for what we believe will be a boundary breaking exhibition for the region and a fitting celebration of a great artist,” he stressed.
‘El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale’, curated by the late Enwezor and Princeton University’s Department of Art and Archaeology art history professor Chika Okeke-Agulu, focuses on the triumphant and monumental quality of the artist’s sculptures.
The exhibition encompasses every medium in the artist’s remarkable 50-year career, including the signature bottle-cap series developed over the last two decades; wood sculptures and wall reliefs spanning the mid-1970’s to the late 1990’s; ceramic sculptures of the late 1970’s, as well as drawings, prints and books. 
The artist’s works are showcased across 10 separate gallery spaces at Mathaf, including Logoligi Logarithm, a specially created installation for the gallery’s performance space.
Structurally related to Anatsui’s 2010 work Gli (Wall), the diaphanous form of this masterpiece is achieved through the stitching patterns he and his assistants developed using thin bottle cap seals. 
Logoligi Logarithm’s alluring play of light and material recalls the refraction of sunlight in a mist or fog. The work is dedicated to the Ghanaian poet, AtukweiOkai, who died in 2018.
Anatsui, born in 1944 in Ghana, consistently worked to transform the formal possibilities of African sculptural idioms.  
Over 50 years, the award-winning artist repeatedly revised and reinvented his material and compositional techniques to astonishing effect – from the early smaller wooden reliefs with their incised markings and broken ceramic forms, to the monumental outdoor cement sculptures.
Anatsui brings about meaning out of his material and technical process such as the bottle caps, which come from hard liquors introduced by Europeans as currency – and thus a means of subjugation – during the era of transatlantic slavery and colonisation. 
The exhibition, organised by Haus der Kunst, Munich, in co-operation with Mathaf, the Kunstmuseum Bern, and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, will run until January 31, 2020. It will be open from 9am-7pm (Sunday to Thursday) and from 1.30pm-7pm on Fridays. Admission is free.
‘El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale’ will move to the Kunstmuseum Bern from March 13 until June 21, 2020; and to Guggenheim Bilbao from July 17 until November 1, 2020.