El Anatsui
Found a sack of discarded bottle tops in his fifties and turned rubbish into shimmering cloth
El Anatsui was born in Anyako, a lagoon town in the Volta region of Ghana, the youngest of his father\'s thirty-two children. His mother died when he was small and he was raised by an uncle who was a Presbyterian minister. He trained as an artist at the university in Kumasi, where the curriculum was still largely European, and spent his early career trying to work out what an African art education might look like instead.
In 1975 he took a teaching post at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka and stayed for four decades. He made wooden panels scorched and carved with a chainsaw, broken ceramic pieces and wall reliefs, showing regularly but never widely. He was in his mid-fifties when, walking near his studio, he picked up a bin bag full of aluminium screw tops from liquor bottles, the spirits Europeans had once traded for slaves, now distilled locally.
He and his assistants flattened, folded and pierced them, then stitched them together with copper wire into sheets that could be draped like cloth over walls and buildings. They looked from a distance like kente or gold and, close up, like what they were. A hanging on the facade of the Palazzo Fortuny at the 2007 Venice Biennale made him famous. He received the Biennale\'s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in 2015 and filled Tate Modern\'s Turbine Hall in 2023. He insists the pieces be hung differently each time; a work, he says, should never be finished.