Mask - Gabon (No reserve price)

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Bakota ritual double bell

Link between the world of the living and the dead in African art, piece collected "in situ".

This Bakota ritual double bell was used to invoke the spirits of the deceased when, in the exclusive presence of initiates, the major decisions of the clan or lineage were taken during ceremonies in which reliquaries were brought out and used.

Among the Kota, these figures have reached a stupefyingly high degree of stylization and abstraction: reduced to the shoulders and the "arms" surmounted by a large face, the face can be concave (female) or convex (male).

They display a peculiarity that is found far less ostentatiously elsewhere in the rest of Black African art: copper and brass, in the form of inlays, are systematically and broadly integrated into the composition