The Carnegie International Explores its Past With an Eye to the Future
El Anatsui, Three Angles, façade of CMOA, (2018). Photograph by Shael Shapiro The façade of the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) in Pittsburgh is hardly recognizable. It’s cloaked in a 30-foot-high installation of wired-together bottle caps; reclaimed aluminum printing plates, arranged according to color in patches of red, blue, and yellow; and mirrored metal. This is the creation of Ghanaian artist El Anatsui, whose similar works of metal and bottle caps and copper wire have covered buildings including the El Badi Palace in Morocco.
Here, Anatsui was inspired by a specific day that he visited Pittsburgh in 2017. It was cold, grey, and drizzling, and he was struck by how the rain had transformed a Richard Serra sculpture in front of the museum. The wetness seemed to merge with the very material of the sculpture itself. Now his “Three Angles” covers the front of the building like a shimmering cape, enlivening the simple façade with a three-dimensional fabric 160 feet wide.
There are words and images on the printing plates but they are too far away to read. Instead, they create a sense of sculptural lightness, layered on each other with linear creases
