Statuette - Bakongo - DR Congo

Two-figure statue – Kongo (Mboma area?) – Democratic Republic of the Congo

A rare wooden sculpture, imbued with Kongo aesthetics and funerary thought, inspired by the great corpus of Ntadi in stone.

This wooden statue undeniably belongs to the Kongo cultural world, but it does not fall within the corpus of Ntadi / Mintadi in the strict sense, as these are exclusively made in stone. Conversely, it borrows some major formal and symbolic codes, transposed here into a perishable material, probably intended for a different or complementary use.

The two-person composition, vertical and hierarchical, evokes a cosmological reading well known among the Kongo: the layering of worlds, the continuity between the living and the ancestors, and the idea of spiritual support. The upper figure, calm and self-possessed, contrasts with the one below, whose deliberately tilted head breaks the axis of symmetry. This detail is essential.

Crooked faces, oblique or misaligned gazes are recurring elements in Kongo art, notably in works related to notions of imbalance, illness, transition or passage. This deliberate expressiveness, sometimes labeled as 'brutalist', is never gratuitous: it conveys a liminal state, a tension between two realities.

The use of wood, combined with a dark and glossy patina, suggests a manipulated, activated work, perhaps ritually invested, rather than a durable funerary marker like Ntadi in stone. In this context, an attribution to the Kongo Mboma area appears quite coherent. The Mboma, located in the Bas-Congo, produced powerful wooden sculptures, sometimes austere, incorporating an iconography strongly marked by funerary thought and the relationship to the ancestors.

This statue can thus be understood as a wooden rendering of a funerary symbolic vocabulary, intended for domestic, ritual, or communal use, rather than for a permanent tomb site. The rigidity of the volumes, the frontal stance, the hierarchy of the figures, and the expressive intensity point to an older production, probably from the first half of the 20th century, or even earlier.

A demanding work, with great visual strength, that will appeal to enthusiasts of radical Kongo statuary, where form serves to convey meaning above all.

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