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Descrizione : Important Kota Mbulu Ngulu Gabon H: 50 cm (approx. 1’ 8”) Published: “Chroniques du Sacrè” Chàteau du Grand Jardin, Joinville, Haute Marne, p. 48. Compare: Christie’s, London, “The Doris and Eric Beyersdorf Collection of African Art”, June 29, 1994, lot 20, Nahon (Pierre), Quelques Impressions d’Afrique, Galerie Beaubourg, Château Notre-Dame des Fleurs, Vence, 1996, Artcurial, Paris, June 7, 2004. Lot 81. Lehuard (Raoul), “Art Africain & Art Contemporain” in Arts d’Afrique Noire, No. 100, 1996 Provenance: Belgian private collection The Kota (or Bakota) people live in the East and Southeast of Gabon ― a smaller number also cross the border into the Congo. The original religion of the Kota people was a distinct ancestor cult: the deceased were first laid out in the forest, then buried in the earth. After some time, the skulls of important clan founders and chieftains were excavated and, as a sort of second funeral, were placed in large baskets with other remembrance pieces. These baskets were sealed and preserved in special huts, or sacred shrines. If the village was moved, the baskets containing the bones of the ancestors accompanied the tribe to the new village, where they constructed a new, special shrine. A reliquary guardian figure, the mbulu ngulu (reliquary basket with figure), “sat” on each of these baskets containing the ancestor’s bones. They were carved from wood and covered with brass plates or copper discs. The figures towered over each basket. This mbulu ngulu effigy is a testament to the talent that certain artists possessed for transforming the stylistic canons established by the Kota mosaic. The face ― in very high relief, with convex-concave volumes and the eyes represented as broad cupules ― is related to the southern Kota variants, specifically the Kota Obamba and Ndasa. Its expressiveness is accentuated by the slenderness of the figure and the power of the outlines that contain each volume. The offered reliquary figure is related, within the southern Kota style, to the corpus that Louis Perrois has attributed to the “Master of the Sebe” (in de Grunne, Mains de maîtres, 2001, p. 141-159). In all likelihood, the offered figure is from the same region ― the Sebé Valley in eastern Gabon, on the right bank of the Ogooué. The singular aesthetic impact of this figure reminds us that “despite the constraints of style, sculptors were often able to give their works a ‘personality’ that the villagers of eastern Gabon appreciated as connoisseurs. Each ritual effigy, crafted according to forms memorized from initiates’ visions, is an impossible portrait, the fruit of an extremely rich and ambivalent common seam of imagination, based both on the fear of the deceased and the hope for their aid, these works are ‘images’ of dreams meant more for minds than eyes” (Perrois, ibid, p. 151). The copper alloy is missing on the right side of the foot.
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