Statuette - Bakongo - DR Congo (No reserve price)

Double-figure statue – Kongo (Mboma area?) – Democratic Republic of 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 unquestionably belongs to the Kongo cultural world, but does not strictly belong to the Ntadi / Mintadi corpus, which are exclusively carved in stone. Yet it borrows some major plastic and symbolic codes, transposed here into a perishable material, probably intended for a different or supplementary 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 upper figure, calm and controlled, contrasts with the lower one, whose intentionally tilted head breaks the axis of symmetry. This detail is essential.

Cross-eyed faces, oblique or disjointed gazes are recurring elements in Kongo art, especially in works related to notions of imbalance, illness, transition or passage. This deliberate expressiveness, sometimes described as “brutalist,” is never gratuitous: it expresses a liminal state, a tension between two realities.

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

This statue could thus be understood as a wooden transposition of a funerary symbolic vocabulary, intended for domestic, ritual or community use, rather than a permanent tomb location. The rigidity of the volumes, the frontal stance, the hierarchy of the figures and the intense expressiveness recall an older production, probably from the first half of the 20th century, or even earlier.

A demanding work, of great visual strength, which will appeal to lovers of radical Kongo statuary, where form serves above all to convey meaning.

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