El Anatsui's Tapestries

El Anatsui, Anonymous Creature, 2009, found aluminium and copper wire
(taken from http://www.art21.org/images/el-anatsui/anonymous-creature-2009)

El Anatsui’s bottle cap tapestries strike me as substantive work because of their compelling formal and conceptual elements. The wall pieces relate to both painting and sculpture. The intricate patchwork addresses color through constructed patterns while also addressing physicality and real space by appropriating liquor bottle caps as a singular unit with a dimensionality that, when multiplied, comprises an unexpected whole. The tapestries have a nuanced engagement with beauty. Their formal elements create a rewarding visual and tactile experience that can seduce one into reverie, as beauty often does.  Yet, the tapestries also incorporate a more cerebral content that is in tension with pure formal seduction. The liquor bottle caps—found objects in Nigeria yet ultimately a Western product—rendered in patterns evocative of traditional African kente cloth document a complex cultural exchange between Africa and the West. The liquor bottle caps recording this exchange are evidence of commoditization. The caps invite contemplation of the history of the exchange, to when liquor was first introduced to Africa by colonizers. Simultaneously, they are contemporary objects informed by current African and Western artistic conventions.