Media coverage
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Media coverage
Title Edinburgh art festival 2024 review - from pure joy to war-torn desolation Media name/outlet The Observer Media type Web Country/Territory United Kingdom Date 11/08/24 Description The great, dark quadrangle of the University of Edinburgh glows with light. It comes from a colossal sheet of what appears to be fabric hung between classical columns. Fields of cream, gold and rust, with sporadic blue waves and scarlet spots, suggest topographies with coastlines and cities. Then an August breeze riffles the surface and you realise that everything you see is made of fragments of metal: tiny tessellations somehow woven into this glittering swathe. It is one of the most dramatic curtain-raisers in contemporary art.
The veteran Ghanaian artist El Anatsui (b 1944) made this masterpiece with the flattened caps of liquor bottles, their tags and labels, all stitched together with copper wire. It speaks of long and infinitesimal labour in a land of historic enslavement. There is a direct yet poetic connection between the exquisite sight and the recycled detritus of colonial trade. And there is much more of Anatsui’s stupendous art through a quadrangle door and into the Talbot Rice Gallery upstairs.
The show opens with the earliest of these shimmering chainmail weavings, smaller scale and more loosely constructed from thousands of brilliant aluminium fragments, titled Woman’s Cloth (2001). The method is plainly visible, the hands of the artist and his assistants pressing on the metal, cutting, piercing and linking the elements together: discs, pennants and rectangles, mainly in red and black, or their undersides in silver and gold. It is swagged at a jaunty angle (Anatsui leaves galleries free to display his work as they please).
And suspended opposite is his latest creation, Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta, conjuring memories of the library that gave him books and crayons as a child in Ghana. Thirteen metres of glorious gold-yellow discs, rising up in geological folds like the volcanic surroundings of Edinburgh itself, and made specially for this show, it is a wall of pure joy holding tiny intermittent scribbles and dots – half a letter, a printed curlicue or apostrophe – that resemble the first scribbles of a child.
Freedom, from 2021, brings you closer into the geopolitical detail of these works. The brand names are telling – Lords, Castles, Chelsea – ribboning across the glinting fragments, literally woven into the piece, metaphorically into the history of Ghana. Alcohol was one of the earliest imports from the west, first traded for gold and then for people. Three forms seem to fly free as birds, here, leaving all this behind; and the work is mounted so that it turns a corner.
Upstairs are sonorous prints, early woodworks and glittering mother of pearl oceans. In the Georgian Gallery, Anatsui works his recycled metal into forms akin to lace, macramé, willow weaving, the finest filigree and the heaviest tapestry. Anyone who saw his marvellous Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern earlier this year will know how huge and diaphanous his works can be, as well as how devastating. This show gives you El Anatsui in full, from the most condensed and lyrical to the grandest of three-dimensional spectacles, singing of tragedy, humanity and hope through the purest visual delight. A coup for the Talbot Rice Gallery, this is the largest retrospective of his work ever held in the UK.Producer/Author Laura Cumming Persons Tessa Giblin