Mask - Mali (No reserve price)

This Dogon statue depicts a woman kneeling with an elongated body, slender and bent limbs, a child sculpted on her back. The sculpture can be linked to the Bombou-Toro style, named after the Bombou region, in the central-southern part of the Bandiagara Cliff in Mali. Hélène Leloup describes Bombou-Toro statues as follows: “Much less realistic than the Djenné statues, almost schematic, they seem to reflect the daily vision of the cliff's overhangs, the abrupt side of the environment which conveys to the sculptor its rigorous characteristics” (Leloup, Dogon Sculpture,
In this beautiful statue you can detect a strong verticality and a pronounced rigidity of the volumes, as well as a stiffness and a frontal posture, inherited, still according to Leloup, from Tellem and Niongom sculptures. The tubular, slim, elongated limbs are also characteristic of this cliff-face region.