El Anatsui Selects Bronwyn Katz as his Rolex® Protégé
Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-Ke and jazz singer Dianne Reeves also named mentees as part of the luxury watch brand's decades-long arts initiative.
El Anatsui and Bronwyn Katz. Courtesy Rolex/Tomas Bertelsen.
On 10 September, Rolex announced the latest round of participants in their arts mentorship programme, which was established in 2002.
Ghana-born artist El Anatsui—who creates fabulous assemblages using materials such as clay, wood, nylon string, and bottle caps—chose to work with South African sculptor Bronwyn Katz during the 2023–2024 cycle.
Katz, who lives in Cape Town, also makes use of found materials in her work. She won Africa's First National Bank Art Prize in 2019 for a wall-mounted sculpture entitled Droom boek (2017), which made use of salvaged bed springs and mattress foam.
A solo exhibition of her work showed at London's White Cube gallery in 2021, and she participated in the International Art Exhibition of the 2022 Venice Biennale.
Anatsui is Emeritus Professor in Sculpture of the University of Nigeria, an Honorary Royal Academician of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.
The other pairings in the 2023–2024 cycle of Rolex mentors and mentees are: Booker Prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo and Ghanaian writer Ayesha Harruna Attah; Pritzker Prize-winner Anne Lacaton and Lebanese-Armenian architect Arine Aprahamian; Golden Lion-winner Jia Zhang-Ke and Filipino filmmaker Rafael Manuel; and five-time Grammy Award-winner Dianne Reeves with South Korean singer and composer Song Yi Jeon.
'Rolex is deeply grateful to the mentors for their commitment to advancing the artistry of the next generation through the irreplaceable tradition of individual exchange and inspiration,' said Rebecca Irvin, head of the mentoring programme.
'We also extend our congratulations to the protégés, who now join the global and multigenerational artistic community that has grown over the past two decades,' she said.
Previous visual arts mentors in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative include Olafur Eliasson, David Hockney, Anish Kapoor, and William Kentridge.
Most recently, photographer Carrie Mae Weems was a mentor to Colombia-born artist Camila Rodríguez Triana. —[O]
