El Anatsui Wows World’ Most Prestigious Art Fair

International Mon 21-03-2011

El Anatsui Wows World’ Most Prestigious Art Fair
By Osei G Kofi | AfricanColours.com

Flattened bottle caps, scrap aluminum and copper wire tapestry of Ghanaian El Anatsui has been a resounding hit with art lovers at the 25th edition of the European Fine Art & Antiques Fair (TEFAF), the world’s most prestigious annual art market based in the Dutch city of Maastricht.

Flag for a New World Power, the red, gold and terra cotta-hued 500 x 500cm creation, models the intricate patterns of the Kente cloth favoured by Ashanti nobility of Ghana. It was snatched up for 600,000 Euro by an unknown collector within an hour of the fair’s Press and Collectors preview on Thursday, March 16.

Alex Vervoordt in front of his El Anatsui

^Mr.^{Axel Vervoordt}^{with his assistant Anne-Sophie. In the background is his collection of El Antsui's work.}

Six hundred thousand euro is “modest” for El Anatsui's which have been going for a tad higher at Art Basel and on the north American market lately.

“This one comes from his early tapestries and the buyer is a happy one today. It was a good bargain,” said Mr Axel Vervoordt, of the eponymous Kobe and Antwerp-based gallery who brought the “Flag for A New World Power” to TEFAF.

Pressed to name who acquired the masterpiece, Mr Vervoordt demurred. As is custom in the gilded and perfumed stands of these posh art affairs, gallery owners and dealers are loath to reveal the identity of buyers, and not even my ingratiating pitch that El Anatsui and I hail from the same town, Kumasi, Ghana, would prise open Mr Vervoordt’s sealed lips. Luckily his quiet assistant, Anne-Sophie, out of her boss’ earshot whispered the sale price to me. I’ve never understood this omerta why sellers never tell how much they sold an item for, and to whom. Do you?

Actually, Mr Vervoordt was instrumental in El Anatsui’s meteoric rise on the international scene less than a decade ago. For years the talented supremely confident art lecturer beavered away in academia, unknown and unsung, outside the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology, Kumasi, and later at the University of Nsukka, Nigeria.

Then came the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007. Mr Vervoordt, among the art world’s bel mondo and a mover and shaker in the Venice Biennale decided, with his friend Mattijs Visser, to hang El Anatsui’s Fresh and Fading Memories (2004) on the façade of the Palazzo Fortuny, a historic edificio described as part Visconti’s Senso, part Blade Runner, part D’Annunzio’s Flame of Life, and part Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

It was a sensational move, and presto – a star was born. The cognoscenti had never seen anything like it before. Every art writer in Venice worth his or her salt wrote about that metal tapestry from Africa. For months photographs of it appeared in every worthy art magazine around the globe.

^{Dusasa 1 by El Anatsui | Aluminum liquor bottle caps and copper wire | Size 240 x 360 inches |} ^{Venice Biennial 2007}

Another tapestry, Dusasa I, the size of a tennis court, had hung inside the Arsenale proper. Other versions were later shown at the Seattle Art Museum prompting one visitor to emote thus: “a truly third-world culture shock. Words fail to describe. Photos fail too.”

“I must confess, credit goes to the Japanese,” Mr Vervoordt said. “They’d brought El Anatsui to Kobe couple of years earlier. That’s where I first saw his work. I was stunned. He was shot in the arm the contemporary art world needed. I was determined to show him in Italy,” he added.

Today, no major art fair is complete without one or two specimen from the Ghanaian maestro - and they are usually snatched up within hours of the opening. One must queue up on El Anatsui agents’ waiting list to be able to acquire a new work.

Every national museum in the west wants one. I am unaware if any African museum or gallery is interested in him for that matter. Eli Broad, California’s megabucks man and a Warren Buffet of the art world, recently acquired a massive El Anatsui that I’d first spied at Art Basel a couple of years earlier.

^{Jeff Koons BMW art car}

Mr Vervoordt’s showcase has become one of three or four major crowd pullers at TEFAF 2011, alongside Jeff Koons’ BMW M3Gt2 Art Car and a recently unearthed Rembrandt, Portrait of a Man with Arms Akimbo, priced at 25 million Euro, the most expensive lot at the fair.

No mean feat for a Kumasi native in an art summit replete with Old and Modern Masters, as well as Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Tang dynasty antiquities, heh?

As I bade farewell to Mr Vervoordt, the throng of oohing and aahing fair goers jostled to take snapshots of Flag for a New World Power or be photographed with it. To paraphrase Pliny the Elder, there will always be something new, fresh, worthy – pace setting - out of Africa. Eat your heart out Damien Hirst – oops, I meant VS Naipaul!

^{Guests at El Anatsui's show}

Posted By: Maggie Otieno

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imieh aziza paul: EL'; simply awesome,our thread has come a long way!

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