Statuette - Bakongo - DR Congo

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

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

This wooden statue clearly belongs to the Kongo cultural world, but it does not strictly belong to the Ntadi / Mintadi corpus, which are exclusively carved in stone. On the other hand, it adopts certain major plastic and symbolic codes, transposed here into a perishable material, probably intended for a different or complementary use.

The two-figure 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 top figure, calm and controlled, contrasts with the lower one, whose deliberately inclined head breaks the axis of symmetry. This detail is essential.

Crooked faces, oblique or dislocated gazes are recurring elements in Kongo art, notably in works linked to notions of imbalance, illness, transition or passage. This deliberate expressiveness, sometimes described as “brutalist,” is never gratuitous: it reflects a liminal state, a tension between two realities.

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

Thus, this statue could be understood as a wooden transposition of a funerary symbolic vocabulary, intended for domestic, ritual or community 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.

An exacting work, of great visual power, which will appeal to enthusiasts of radical Kongo statuary, where form primarily serves meaning.

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