An outstanding Mumuye sculpture, Nigeria, standing on shortened, zigzag-shaped legs, a concave curved torso with a long navel, the arms hang down very long and are bend slightly inward and forward somehow spiralling, an elongated neck which picks up on the foundational spiral posture is supporting a helmet-like head, the face with big round eyes and a small nose impresses enormously; partly glossy, dark brown patina, traces of age, ritual use, some minor cracks and bigger cracks and insect damage on the right leg and foot.

"In art-loving and art-historical circles, the name Mumuye is currently associated with a stunning corpus of figure sculptures and, to a lesser extent, with a wide variety of masks. (...) They marveled at the daringly modern, reductive interpretation of the human body that in many ways recalls the approach to anatomy adopted by artists of the Cubist and Expressionist movements in the early twentieth century. Today, almost fifty years after their sudden appearance in the European and American capitals of African art, Mumuye figure sculptures rank among the most cherished of sub-Saharan Africa."

Lit.: Frank Herreman and Constantine Petridis: The Discovery of Mumuye Art. In: Frank Herreman: Mumuye: Sculpture from Nigeria. The Human Figure Reinvented, Milan 2016, p. 9 (8-13).

sold

Height: 133 cm
Weight: 11,3 kg