Gravity and Grace, the show of sculpture by El Anatsui at the Brooklyn Museum, is well named. The artworks, giant nets made from scraps salvaged from discarded bottlecaps, cans, and printing plates, have an imposing scale and complexity and a light, fluid presence. They’re evocative: of fishing nets, molecular structures, chain mail, Navajo blankets, and pixellated imagery. They feel more like fabrics than like artworks, and I wanted nothing more than to get a piece and make a gown with it, in which I could parade triumphantly through the museum as the waves of metal bits glittered and swished around me. One friend I was with warned, “That dress is going to be scratchy.”
While all the sculptures are engaging, I’m confused by their presentation. Some are pinned to the wall with deep folds and bumps, and have tendrils that spill onto the floor. Some have internal frames and stand on their own And some are draped from wires like bedsheets hanging to dry. El Anatsui’s works fall somewhere between painting and sculpture – field and figure – but I can only see them as textiles. And I wanted the works to be displayed very simply, squared-off and pinned flat against a blank wall. Some of the freestanding sculptures have great power. A field of knee-high mounds constructed from gold soup can lids rises from the floor like a swarm of sea creatures. But the most sophisticated pieces are those fashioned from bottlecap scraps. These metal bits are hammered flat like ribbon, folded into squares, or puckered like flowers, and then tied together, one by one, by the thousands, with thin twists of wire. The contrast in the sizes and colors of these scraps, and between the larger fields in which they’re laid, give the panels rich overlapping rhythms. One looks and gets lost inside. These pieces don’t need to be shaped sculpturally or flooded with sunlight or blown with fans (as one piece in the show is). They are magical surfaces; they have life.