Mask - Gabon (No reserve price)

Piece on a pedestal... Decorative Kota reliquary from Gabon

The memory of the ancestors is religiously guarded in every family: fetishes, ornaments, and weapons are passed down.
To fail to honor the memory of deceased parents, they would avenge themselves with an inevitable punishment,” he notes scrupulously in his famous work Au cœur de l’Afrique. But where Fang artists showed their inclination for powerful rondes-bosses, the Kota confessed, for their part, a clear predilection for abstraction and stylization. Covered with fine sheets of copper and brass, their reliquary figures surprise thus by their two-dimensional character, quite rare in African art.
A charming engraving, published in 1888 in the magazine Le Tour du monde, places them back in their original context: gathered in a small hut, sheltered from profane and impure eyes, they topped the bark boxes preserving the skulls and bones of important tribe members.
Far, far from these ethnological considerations, collectors and artists of the early 20th century especially appreciated, in these eminently decorative sculptures, the strange flat and ovoid face punctuated by the two large circular eyes of these “guardians of the forces of the beyond.”