El Anatsui has garnered international recognition for his glittering hangings wired together from thousands of flattened liquor bottle caps, displayed in recent major shows in Venice and London.

Now the 66-year-old Ghana-born, Nigeria-based sculptor’s retrospective, When I Last Wrote To You About Africa (mounted by New York’s Museum for African Art to open its new 5th Avenue location in the spring) comes to the ROM’s Institute for Contemporary Culture.

A vivid visual pleasure, those draped, large-scale bottle-cap “tapestries” – there are lots of them here – reference West African textile traditions and the continent’s creative reuse of metal, as well as commenting on the role of the liquor trade in colonialism.

But the show also offers a context for these mature works. Early ceramic sculptures cultivate an aesthetic of broken container forms, some exploding with interior plant-like growth. Prints and paintings show a love of accumulative geometric pattern, as do works made from carved and painted wooden slats, some using Ghanaian adinkra pictographs as lines of text.

Especially moving is Akua’s Surviving Children, a gathering of “figures” created during a residency in Denmark from driftwood upright “bodies” and fragmentary “heads” attached with nails from a forge that made weapons for the slave trade. The semi-abstract grouping conveys a strong sense of sadness and dignity.

Installations include Peak Project, a landscape of golden hills formed from sheets of Peak Milk can lids (another reference to a Western product’s impact on Africa), and Open(ing) Market, a slew of small metal boxes and a few suitcase-sized ones that Anatsui commissioned from local tinkers and lined with colourful advertisements. In the first-floor lobby, a wall of discarded nail-punched metal cassava graters prefigures the bottle-cap works.

The angular space at the top of the Crystal, broken up for the show by deep blue walls, makes a great setting for Anatsui’s art. How will Robert A.M. Stern’s New York gallery, whose construction delays are our good fortune, compare?

art@nowtoronto.com