London's October Gallery in Bloomsbury and Goodman Gallery in Mayfair have opened concurrent exhibitions of Go Back and Pick, a collaborative presentation of new works by El Anatsui that revisit and reimagine wood, one of his foundational materials. Sourced from the Nsukka Market in Nigeria — where the artist has lived for the past five decades — the salvaged timber carries the wear of its past lives: scratches, burns, and scored lines ripple across the surface of these sculptural wall panels. The works are modular, designed for shifting configurations, and enriched with earthy pigments and primary colour tempera.
When Anatsui arrived in Nsukka from Ghana in 1975 to take up a teaching post, he turned away from wood, making clay his primary material for many years. It wasn't until 1980, during a residency in the United States, that he returned to timber.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Anatsui explored and experimented with wood, transforming it with power tools into panels, figures, and large-scale installations that blurred the line between sculpture and architecture. This approach became his signature style, persisting even as his celebrated metal wall hangings brought international acclaim.
At October Gallery, works such as Passage of Time (2023), Novisi (2024), and Moon Fragments (2024) form lyrical compositions of rhythm, texture, and space.
El Anatsui. Passage of Time, 2023Courtesy of the artist, October Gallery and Goodman Gallery
Passage of Time is a large-scale panel composed of vertical wooden slats that converge into a central vanishing point. Through incised lines and tonal gradation, El Anatsui creates the illusion of depth, drawing the viewer into an architectural corridor. Accented with flashes of pigment along the top and bottom edges, it offers a spatial meditation on movement, history, and duration. In Novisi, Anatsui adopts a more rhythmic approach, layering darkened, textured wood with striped patterns and inserting bright, painterly stitches of colour throughout.
El Anatsui.Novisi, 2024Courtesy of the artist, October Gallery and Goodman Gallery
Moon Fragments brings a celestial rhythm to the exhibition. Its surface is broken by charred semicircles and negative spaces that recall lunar cycles or celestial maps. The scorched lattice patterns and scattered voids give the work a sense of both erosion and reassembly — a sky mapped in wood and fire, illuminated by flashes of colour along its irregular borders.
El Anatsui. Moon Fragments, 2024Courtesy of the artist, Goodman Gallery and Jackson Pearce White
At Goodman Gallery, Anatsui extends his dialogue with wood through the incorporation of bottle caps — a material that has long defined his practice and recalls his celebrated large-scale bottle-top installations.
For example, in Theta (2025), composed of burnt and incised tropical hardwood, bottle caps protrude from the surface like threads in a woven textile, shimmering against fields of carved texture. Fli (2025) plays with vertical tension, layering painted wood and metal elements into a surface that shifts between stillness and motion.
Anatsui has long embraced “the unfixed form” — a principle that allows his works to remain fluid and open-ended. Each modular panel can be reconfigured in countless ways, adapting to its setting and renewing its composition with every installation.
Taken together, the works featured at Go Back and Pick form a large-scale meditation on transformation, adaptability, and material continuity. The unfixed form becomes a metaphor for artistic evolution itself, connecting his early engagement with wood to the global resonance of his sculptural language today. The show coincides with Anatsui’s inclusion in Nigerian Modernism at Tate Modern, on view until 10 May 2026, situating his works within a broader reflection on West African artistic legacies and modern identities.
El Anatsui: Go Back and Pick
9 October – 29 November, 2025 at October Gallery and 11 October – 19 November at Goodman Gallery
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