A wooden sculpture - Prampram - Ghana
06
days
11
hours
54
minutes
58
seconds
Current bid
€ 170
Reserve price not met
Expert
Selected by Julien Gauthier
A decade of experience in historical arms, armour, and African art.
Estimate € 500 - € 650
23 other people are watching this object
 | €170 | |
|---|---|---|
 | €160 | |
 | €150 | |
Catawiki Buyer Protection
Your payment’s safe with us until you receive your object.View details
Trustpilot 4.4 | 132471 reviews
Rated Excellent on Trustpilot.
Wooden sculpture from Ghana attributed to the Prampram, titled A wooden sculpture, height 59 cm, weight 1770 g, sold with stand, in fair condition.
AI-assisted summary
Description from the seller
A Prampram couple attributed to a well-known carver is distinguished by an unusually flattened corpus and arms that taper to points, arranged in an almost diagonal orientation. Within the archive, several comparable yet unpublished sculptures suggest the presence of a specific hand or workshop, pointing toward a coherent sculptural language that merits closer stylistic and material analysis. At the same time, there exist field photographs whose circulation remains deliberately restricted; they are reserved բացառively for scholarly consultation within a tightly controlled context. One publicly accessible image of a Prampram fetish hut may serve here as a reference for the external architectural form of such structures, without encroaching upon their protected interior domains.
Our decision to refrain from publishing images of the interiors of fetish huts and their altars is informed by a cautionary precedent. In the case of the Lobi, a large number of photographs documenting highly sensitive ritual contexts were once disseminated in a widely read art journal. The outcome was deeply problematic. Only subsequent political circumstances in Burkina Faso prevented the transformation of these intimate ritual spaces into objects of touristic consumption. The scholarly value of those publications proved minimal. Rather than engaging in sustained, focused research with a limited number of informants and a clearly defined material scope, the approach taken at the time resulted in extensive violations of ritual privacy—an outcome that had already been explicitly warned against.
Prampram fetish hut, Southern Ghana (last photo sequence).
Equally complex is the issue of the circulation and trade of artifacts originating from comparatively under-researched groups such as the Prampram within the broader Ga-Dangme context. The tensions between legitimate scholarly or collecting interests and the question of voluntary transfer of ownership are embedded in a wider field of asymmetrical cultural encounters between African societies and Western institutions. These encounters are shaped by differing conceptions of value, authorship, and custodianship. A sustainable and ethically defensible path forward requires a careful balancing of research imperatives, market dynamics, and the conditions of digital dissemination. Respect, restraint, and contextual sensitivity remain indispensable in navigating these intersecting domains.
Selected literature
Cole, Herbert M., and Doran H. Ross. The Arts of Ghana. Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, 1977.
Eicher, Joanne B., ed. Ghana: Traditions and Change. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.
Fischer, Eberhard, and Hans Himmelheber. Afrikanische Kunst: Meisterwerke aus dem Museum Rietberg Zürich. Zürich: Museum Rietberg, 1984.
Kreamer, Christine Mullen. African Art in American Collections. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.
Meyer, Birgit. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Preston Blier, Suzanne. African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
CAB46691
Height: 59 cm / 49 cm
Weight: 890 g / 880 g (incl. stand)
Seller's Story
Wolfgang Jaenicke’s engagement with African art did not begin in the field or the marketplace but in a quieter, more inward space—among papers, books, and objects that belonged to his father. The archive on Germany’s former colonies was not arranged to tell a single story; it suggested many. It invited scrutiny rather than reverence, and it taught Jaenicke early on that objects are never mute. They carry time inside them—fracture and continuity held in the same form—and they ask to be read as carefully as texts.
For more than a quarter century, Jaenicke has worked as a collector, dealer, and intermediary, though none of these terms quite captures the shape of his practice. What used to be grouped, too casually, under the heading of “Tribal Art” has never appeared to him as a sealed or historical category. It is, instead, a set of living traditions, constantly negotiating the present. His academic training—in ethnology, art history, and comparative law—provided a grammar. The language itself he learned elsewhere. In Mali, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Ghana, knowledge emerged slowly, through repeated encounters that hardened into relationships, and through trust built not all at once but over years.
Mali became the gravitational center of this experience. Between 2002 and 2012, Jaenicke lived and worked in Bamako and Ségou, where he ran Tribalartforum, a gallery overlooking the Niger River. The space resisted easy chronology. Sculptures and ceramics shared the room with photography, and works by Malick Sidibé—images of Malian youth in the 1970s, self-assured and exuberant—hung alongside older ritual forms. The effect was not nostalgic but clarifying: past and present did not cancel each other out; they sharpened one another.
The war of 2012 ended this chapter abruptly, as wars tend to do. But it did not dissolve the work. Together with Aguibou Kamaté, Jaenicke regrouped in Lomé, closer to the places where many of the objects originated and to the routes they continue to travel. Since 2018, Berlin has become another point on this map. Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke now operates opposite Charlottenburg Palace, supported by a small team of specialists. Its focus rests, in particular, on West African bronzes and terracottas—materials shaped by earth and fire, and by forms of memory that resist easy translation.
What distinguishes Jaenicke’s practice is not only its geographical range but its internal tension. Fieldwork is paired with provenance research; commerce is treated as inseparable from responsibility. In collaboration with museums and scholarly initiatives, circulation is framed not as extraction but as an ethical process that remains unfinished. The aim is not to remove objects from the world and seal them off, but to keep them readable within it—to allow them to continue speaking, even as the conditions of their speech change.
A Prampram couple attributed to a well-known carver is distinguished by an unusually flattened corpus and arms that taper to points, arranged in an almost diagonal orientation. Within the archive, several comparable yet unpublished sculptures suggest the presence of a specific hand or workshop, pointing toward a coherent sculptural language that merits closer stylistic and material analysis. At the same time, there exist field photographs whose circulation remains deliberately restricted; they are reserved բացառively for scholarly consultation within a tightly controlled context. One publicly accessible image of a Prampram fetish hut may serve here as a reference for the external architectural form of such structures, without encroaching upon their protected interior domains.
Our decision to refrain from publishing images of the interiors of fetish huts and their altars is informed by a cautionary precedent. In the case of the Lobi, a large number of photographs documenting highly sensitive ritual contexts were once disseminated in a widely read art journal. The outcome was deeply problematic. Only subsequent political circumstances in Burkina Faso prevented the transformation of these intimate ritual spaces into objects of touristic consumption. The scholarly value of those publications proved minimal. Rather than engaging in sustained, focused research with a limited number of informants and a clearly defined material scope, the approach taken at the time resulted in extensive violations of ritual privacy—an outcome that had already been explicitly warned against.
Prampram fetish hut, Southern Ghana (last photo sequence).
Equally complex is the issue of the circulation and trade of artifacts originating from comparatively under-researched groups such as the Prampram within the broader Ga-Dangme context. The tensions between legitimate scholarly or collecting interests and the question of voluntary transfer of ownership are embedded in a wider field of asymmetrical cultural encounters between African societies and Western institutions. These encounters are shaped by differing conceptions of value, authorship, and custodianship. A sustainable and ethically defensible path forward requires a careful balancing of research imperatives, market dynamics, and the conditions of digital dissemination. Respect, restraint, and contextual sensitivity remain indispensable in navigating these intersecting domains.
Selected literature
Cole, Herbert M., and Doran H. Ross. The Arts of Ghana. Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, 1977.
Eicher, Joanne B., ed. Ghana: Traditions and Change. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.
Fischer, Eberhard, and Hans Himmelheber. Afrikanische Kunst: Meisterwerke aus dem Museum Rietberg Zürich. Zürich: Museum Rietberg, 1984.
Kreamer, Christine Mullen. African Art in American Collections. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.
Meyer, Birgit. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Preston Blier, Suzanne. African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
CAB46691
Height: 59 cm / 49 cm
Weight: 890 g / 880 g (incl. stand)
Seller's Story
Wolfgang Jaenicke’s engagement with African art did not begin in the field or the marketplace but in a quieter, more inward space—among papers, books, and objects that belonged to his father. The archive on Germany’s former colonies was not arranged to tell a single story; it suggested many. It invited scrutiny rather than reverence, and it taught Jaenicke early on that objects are never mute. They carry time inside them—fracture and continuity held in the same form—and they ask to be read as carefully as texts.
For more than a quarter century, Jaenicke has worked as a collector, dealer, and intermediary, though none of these terms quite captures the shape of his practice. What used to be grouped, too casually, under the heading of “Tribal Art” has never appeared to him as a sealed or historical category. It is, instead, a set of living traditions, constantly negotiating the present. His academic training—in ethnology, art history, and comparative law—provided a grammar. The language itself he learned elsewhere. In Mali, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Ghana, knowledge emerged slowly, through repeated encounters that hardened into relationships, and through trust built not all at once but over years.
Mali became the gravitational center of this experience. Between 2002 and 2012, Jaenicke lived and worked in Bamako and Ségou, where he ran Tribalartforum, a gallery overlooking the Niger River. The space resisted easy chronology. Sculptures and ceramics shared the room with photography, and works by Malick Sidibé—images of Malian youth in the 1970s, self-assured and exuberant—hung alongside older ritual forms. The effect was not nostalgic but clarifying: past and present did not cancel each other out; they sharpened one another.
The war of 2012 ended this chapter abruptly, as wars tend to do. But it did not dissolve the work. Together with Aguibou Kamaté, Jaenicke regrouped in Lomé, closer to the places where many of the objects originated and to the routes they continue to travel. Since 2018, Berlin has become another point on this map. Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke now operates opposite Charlottenburg Palace, supported by a small team of specialists. Its focus rests, in particular, on West African bronzes and terracottas—materials shaped by earth and fire, and by forms of memory that resist easy translation.
What distinguishes Jaenicke’s practice is not only its geographical range but its internal tension. Fieldwork is paired with provenance research; commerce is treated as inseparable from responsibility. In collaboration with museums and scholarly initiatives, circulation is framed not as extraction but as an ethical process that remains unfinished. The aim is not to remove objects from the world and seal them off, but to keep them readable within it—to allow them to continue speaking, even as the conditions of their speech change.
Details
Ethnic group/ culture
Prampram
Country of Origin
Ghana
Material
Wood
Sold with stand
Yes
Condition
Fair condition
Title of artwork
A wooden sculpture
Height
59 cm
Weight
1770 g
Sold by
GermanyVerified
protop
Rechtliche Informationen des Verkäufers
- Unternehmen:
- Jaenicke Njoya GmbH
- Repräsentant:
- Wolfgang Jaenicke
- Adresse:
- Jaenicke Njoya GmbH
Klausenerplatz 7
14059 Berlin
GERMANY - Telefonnummer:
- +493033951033
- Email:
- w.jaenicke@jaenicke-njoya.com
- USt-IdNr.:
- DE241193499
AGB
AGB des Verkäufers. Mit einem Gebot auf dieses Los akzeptieren Sie ebenfalls die AGB des Verkäufers.
Widerrufsbelehrung
- Frist: 14 Tage sowie gemäß den hier angegebenen Bedingungen
- Rücksendkosten: Käufer trägt die unmittelbaren Kosten der Rücksendung der Ware
- Vollständige Widerrufsbelehrung
