El Anatsui’s retrospective currently at the Blanton brings together a wide body of work, much of which has rarely been shown in the United States. Together these paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations—which range from complete abstractions to anthropomorphic structures—pose questions about the relationships between form and figure, and between formal and social concerns.

Many of the works make use of language signs and symbols. Even in Anatsui’s abstractions, the viewer might productively consider stories and meaning-making as central components of the work. A wooden sculpture called Leopard’s Paw-prints and Other Stories (1991) consists of curved slats of wood aligned vertically together. Anatsui carved and then painted squares, circles, figures, and symbols into the slats before attaching the work to the wall with brackets that wrap over the top and bottom edges of each slat. The edges of the brackets look like feline claws. Anatsui uses a similar iconography in an acrylic painting on masonite called Sacred Secrets Seem to Unfold (1980s). Lines, stripes, triangles and other varied patterns fill the work’s lower register—drawn in thick black lines and then painted with ochre, black, red, white, orange and pink pigments—while above these patterns, thick washes of blues and greens provide a horizontal upper register evocative of sky and water. The repeated patterns hint at language as they develop upon one another. A series of small abstract drawings, mostly untitled, also repeat this symbolic vocabulary. Made between 1979 and 1981, these ink on paper drawings are intimate reflections. Their small scale draws the viewer into the space, creating a dynamic relationship to many of the large sculptures that exhibit the same marks. Like Anatsui’s large-scale wall hangings, these reward viewers who step in close and spend time with the intricate rhythms of the works.

A significant benefit of seeing such a wide range of Anatsui’s work in one place is that it makes the works’ narratives less straightforward than they might initially appear. The complexities are especially interesting in the resonances and separations Anatsui creates between his figural and abstract works. While many of the patterns from the abstract works appear on Anatsui’s figural sculptures, the figures provide a markedly different experience. Three figure groups in the exhibition consist of several sculptures with human features (heads and torsos), all arranged close together. Each group of figures—Akua’s Surviving Children, Devotees and Group Photo—works within a dramatically different emotional register. Anatsui’s 1996 installation Akua’s Surviving Children consists of large driftwood logs standing upright. On top of each log is a burned piece of wood attached to the log with nails; pocked and scarred, the sculptures’ material and construction are evocative. They seem deeply human, each sculpture a person with a long and full life; standing together on a raised platform, their experiences and their losses seem shared. Anatsui first exhibited Akua’s Surviving Children at the Images of Africa Festival in Copenhagen and he constructed the sculptures with nails made at a forge that supplied weaponry for the slave trade. The sculptures seem marked by trauma as their scars implicate their original Danish viewers. Another figure group, Devotees (1987) includes ten figures made in a much smaller scale. Each has a large, bulbous head with small round eyes and slits for mouths. Nestled tightly together, they seem alien, or at least eerily vacant and cult-like with their flat stares. Group Photo, also from 1987, consists of figures arranged in rows by height. Their totem-like bodies have large and phallic heads, each carved with unique and highly emotive expressions. Some of them seem not to want their picture taken and others smile cloyingly. These have none of the pathos of Akua’s Surviving Children or the intense vacancy of Devotees. Instead, they look like ethnographic subjects—the glass case they appear in heightens this effect—gathered together curiously for a portrait.

Considered in relation to one another, Anatsui’s abstract works and his figures pry into forms of meaning-making. Both types of work use similar visual symbols, but these symbols are not analogous. Each enacts different processes of imagination and identification in their viewer; the abstractions are beautiful explorations of color, line, symbol, and shape. The figures work with associative processes of storytelling. A handful of works in the exhibition combine these things. Peak Project (1999), for example, takes the structural approach of Anatsui’s wall hangings, which consist of small pieces of metal woven together with wires. Like the wall hangings, Peak Project turns these metallic constructions into fabric-like constructions. Anatsui gives the curators and preparators the freedom to install the works as they like. In this installation, the pointed structures are arranged in a corner. They seem to be small living things, wrapped in blankets that obscure their form, huddled closely together. The tension between the hardness of the materials (in this case, metal milk can tops and wire) and their implications of softness makes them both visually interesting and narratively suggestive. Less successful, I think, is Open(ing) Market (2004), which consists of hundreds of small metal boxes and three large ones, all arranged as if coming out from an opposite corner of the gallery space. Here the implied figures are the market vendors who set up the boxes, but without them the boxes seem empty. Partially this is an installation problem. If the viewer is meant to stand in as the figure here, the boxes should be more integrated into the gallery space instead of cordoned off and cornered.

Stories, secrets, and symbols coexist with color, line, and form in this exhibition. The strength of Anatsui’s work lies in his deft arrangement of these two vehicles. It allows the viewer to imagine potential narratives or to simply absorb the formal and symbolic resonances between the works.