Demas Nwoko (Nigerian, Born 1935) Terracotta Figure 46 X 21 X 14Cm (18 1/8 X 8 1/4 X 5 1/2In).
Herkunft : [Propriété non datée]
- Acquired direcly from the artist;The collection of Jean Kennedy;A private collection
- Literature Jean Kennedy, New Currents, Ancient Rivers: Contemporary African Artists in a Generation of Change, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press), p. 55
- (illustrated).Ulli Beier, Contemporary Art in Africa, (London: Frederick A Praeger, 1968), p. 43
- (illustrated)
- With a core focus on the human condition, Nwoko is explorative in his mediums and expressive in his depiction of figurative works
- An artist that informs his work with his heritage as well as present day societal experiences and conveyed with architectural, aesthetic and historical understandings, the present work is a remarkably rare and synthesised example of the artist's theoretical and physical forms of expression
- As the first contemporary Nigerian artist to produce highly artistically expressive baked clay works, the present lot holds a monumental role in the history of contemporary African Art
- According to the inscription accompanying the illustration of the present work in Kennedy's book New Currents, Ancient Rivers, Terracotta Figure was completed between the years 1967 and 1968
- However, a very similar work is labelled in The Zaria Art Society, A New Consciousness as 'Senegalese Woman' completed in 1965
- More conspicuously a female figure, the latter rendition seems to be more gender specific, whilst the present lot possesses a more seemingly androgynous and ambiguous character alluding to a character of a more metaphysical nature
- Designing and building his own studios enabled him to have a 'facility for pursuing painting, carving, and casting, and making terra-cotta sculptures'
- (Jean Kennedy, New Currents, Ancient Rivers: Contemporary African Artists in a Generation of Change, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press), p. 55.)
- Redirecting his focus from painting to wooden sculpture from 1963, Nwoko would then move on to working with clays in 1964
- This was the same clay used in the production of traditional pottery of Southern Nigeria
- Terracotta too began to be a medium that Nwoko incorporated into his artistic production given its historical use in depicting figures of Nok and Ife inspiration
- The process of creating terracotta sculptures such as the present lot is an intrinsically detailed process and one that Nwoko himself had to devise and ultimately concluded in constructing a blend of a necessary high temperature pottery kiln and the open firing of pottery traditionally used in Nigeria
- The result was a teak lined and brick truncated cone below the earth which was then enclosed within a brick igloo, enabling isolation and control of the temperature
- A wall of teak logs was further constructed down the centre of the cone to be ignited, and the various sculptures arranged in the centre of the cone at varying levels would then be gradually baked following this combustion
- Informed by the Nok terracotta heads from 300 BC, the present work is informed by the the ancient sculptural work of his heritage, that being the works of Ile-Ife. 'Nwoko's artistic response to the Nok classical form can be best described as formal extrapolation, in the sense that he worked with stock elements, extending their possibilities, adding new ones.' (Chika Okeke-Agulu, 'Nationalism and the Rhetoric of Modernism in Nigeria: The Art of Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko, 1960-1968', Vol. 39, No. 1, African Arts, (UCA James S
- Coleman African Studies Centre, 2006), p. 34.) In keeping with the Natural Synthesis methodology formulated under the Zaria Art Society that Nwoko was a part of during his years as a student, the present work displays a modern translation inspired by the heritage of the artist. 'Nok formal tropes such as large, outsized heads; tubular, as if nonvertebral, body parts; and perforated pupils.' (C
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