Exhibitions: Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui

Reading French philosopher Simone Weil’s 1947 book Gravity and Grace inspired Anatsui to explore the concepts of what he calls “the material and the spiritual, of heaven and earth, of the physical and the ethereal” by using a limited, contrasting color palette, as typified in this work, among his largest. The seriousness of Anatsui’s project reveals itself in the limits to which he stretches his materials and process, while the title and form evoke a poetic interest in transcendence and connection.