A wooden sculpture - Moba - Ghana (No reserve price)
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A wooden sculpture from Northern Ghana of the Moba tradition (Tchitcheri), titled 'A wooden sculpture', with stand included, 142 cm high, 4.6 kg, in fair condition.
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Description from the seller
Moba Sculpture (Tchitcheri) - Northern Ghana, incl stand.
This exceptionally slender wooden figure is abstracted to the very edge of representation. Two narrow, splayed legs merge into an extremely elongated, gently curved body, whose natural curvature of the wood is deliberately incorporated into the composition. The arms appear merely as elongated, parallel slats. A small, spherical head without discernible features forms the understated crown. Notches, cracks, and a dark gray-brown, irregular surface preserve the traces of carving and aging. This radical reduction lends the figure a quiet, almost calligraphic monumentality.
Formally, the work belongs to the Moba tradition, whose settlement area extends across northeastern Ghana and northwestern Togo. Characteristic of this tradition are the tchitcheri: highly abstracted human figures carved from a single piece of wood, created at the behest of a diviner for personal, family, or communal shrines. Size and placement significantly determined their function: Large tchitcheri sakab could represent ancient clan ancestors and were set deep into the ground; medium-sized figures were more likely to be found in family shrine contexts. Without measurements or a confirmed provenance, the present figure cannot be definitively assigned to either of these categories.
Literature (selection)
Christine Mullen Kreamer: “Moba Shrine Figures”, African Arts 20/2, 1987, pp. 52–55, 82–83. AfricaBib
Christine Mullen Kreamer: “Seeing Between Worlds: A Moba Figure”, in: Frederick Lamp (ed.), See the Music, Hear the Dance, Munich 2004. Pacific Lutheran University
THE PHOTO
Between Aestheticization and Appropriation – The Tchitcheri through the Western Gaze
The photograph stages an encounter between two very different aesthetic and cultural orders. At its center, a cellist sits within a decaying, apparently European interior. The dramatic black-and-white composition, the long white dress, monumental mirror, streaming light, and billowing curtains create a romantic, melancholic, almost theatrical atmosphere. To the left stands an extremely slender, elongated wooden figure that formally recalls the tchitcheri of the Moba from northern Ghana and neighboring Togo described in the ethnological text. Its narrow, splayed legs, dramatically elongated body, reduced arms, and small spherical head correspond to the radical abstraction characteristic of this sculptural tradition.
Yet this juxtaposition is deeply ambivalent. The ethnological text makes clear that a tchitcheri was not originally conceived simply as an autonomous “sculpture.” Such figures were created at the request of a diviner and belonged to specific personal, familial, or communal shrine contexts. Size, placement, and location were integral to their meaning. Large tchitcheri sakab, for example, could represent ancient clan ancestors and were planted deeply into the ground. The object was therefore embedded within a social, spiritual, and spatial network of relationships.
The photograph performs precisely the transformation that has characterized much of the Western reception of African objects: a relational and ritually situated object becomes an autonomous aesthetic sculpture. The figure is placed on a pedestal, isolated vertically, and brought into dialogue with symbols of European high culture: the cello, classical musical tradition, elegant dress, and historic interior. At first, this may appear to constitute a form of recognition. The African figure is no longer presented as an ethnographic curiosity but as an artwork of equal formal significance. Yet this apparent elevation also contains a postcolonial problem.
The autonomous artwork, the pedestal, the white cube, the isolated museum display, and the emphasis on form, dating, provenance, and aesthetic quality are neither neutral nor universal modes of presentation. They have largely emerged from European histories of art and collecting. When a tchitcheri is removed from its original field of relationships and appreciated primarily for its abstraction, formal reduction, or “calligraphic monumentality,” a colonial hierarchy can paradoxically persist precisely where it appears to have been overcome. African objects are granted the status of “art” by being translated into the institutional categories of the Western art system.
The photograph makes this tension particularly visible. The cellist acts, performs, and occupies the compositional center. The Moba figure, by contrast, remains a silent and aestheticized counterpart. A blurred human presence also appears in the mirror, introducing a compelling relationship between body, sculpture, memory, and absence. At the same time, the composition can be read critically as a continuation of a Western regime of looking. The African object becomes an atmospheric sign while its original social and spiritual context disappears. Its perceived strangeness and formal radicalism intensify the aesthetic effect of an otherwise distinctly Western-coded setting.
This criticism can be extended to contemporary postcolonial museum practices. Many Western museums are now attempting to address colonial histories of acquisition, conduct provenance research, reconsider problematic terminology, and move away from presenting African objects merely as documents of supposedly “primitive” cultures. The problem arises when decolonization amounts primarily to transferring such objects from ethnographic contexts into the aesthetic framework of the art museum. The older hierarchy – in which European institutions retain the authority to determine what an African object is and how it should be seen – may then survive in a more sophisticated and aesthetically appealing form.
The contradiction becomes even more pronounced when Western museum and exhibition models are subsequently exported to Africa as supposedly universal standards. White-cube architecture, pedestals, vitrines, art-historical classifications, conservation standards, and the categories of the international art market can certainly contribute productively to African cultural institutions. They become problematic, however, when they displace other ways of engaging with objects or are presented as the only legitimate model of professional museology. This could constitute a new and subtler form of cultural colonization: instead of primarily removing objects from Africa and transporting them to Europe, Western categories of seeing, collecting, preserving, classifying, and assigning meaning are exported to Africa.
At the same time, this critique should not reproduce another colonial simplification by imagining “Africa” as possessing a single authentic and unchanging mode of presentation. African curators, artists, communities, and institutions actively appropriate, transform, and hybridize international museum practices. The decisive question is therefore not simply whether a pedestal, vitrine, or white cube is Western in origin. More important is who determines the conditions of presentation, who possesses interpretive authority, and which forms of knowledge are permitted to coexist alongside Western art-historical discourse.
The photograph can therefore be understood as an image of an unresolved postcolonial condition. Its considerable aesthetic power simultaneously depends upon an act of decontextualization: the tchitcheri is incorporated into a European romantic visual world and thereby made legible to a Western-trained aesthetic gaze. A genuinely decolonial presentation would have to move beyond this. It would ask not only where the figure comes from, but what relationships it once constituted, who has the authority to interpret it today, what meanings are lost through its musealization, and whether such an object was ever primarily intended to be looked at as “art.” Only then can aesthetic recognition become part of a deeper reconsideration of how cultural authority and the power to produce meaning continue to be distributed.
Some of the information and photos are generated by artificial intelligence and is based on published sources from the fields of ethnography, archaeology, and art history documents. All information and photos are protected by copyright.
Inv. No. MAZ29479
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.
------------
Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke is a Berlin-based gallery specializing in West African sculpture, bronzes, terracottas, masks, and contemporary African art. It is directed by Wolfgang Jaenicke, whose work combines collecting, dealing, provenance research, fieldwork, and archival documentation.
According to the gallery’s own account, Jaenicke studied ethnology, art history, and comparative law and has worked in the field of African art for more than twenty-five years. His activities developed through long-term engagement in countries including Mali, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Togo. Rather than presenting African art as a closed historical category, he describes it as a continuing cultural tradition shaped by living communities and changing historical contexts.
A particularly important phase of his career was in Mali, where he lived and worked between roughly 2002 and 2012 in Bamako and Ségou. There he operated Tribalartforum, a gallery that combined historical African sculpture with contemporary African photography, including works by Malick Sidibé. The political and military crisis in Mali in 2012 led to the closure of this phase of activity.
Later, together with Aguibou Kamaté, Jaenicke continued working from Lomé, Togo, before establishing a gallery presence in Berlin near Charlottenburg Palace. The gallery places particular emphasis on West African bronzes, terracottas, Benin and Ife-related works, Nok sculpture, Dogon art, Baule sculpture, Senufo objects, and Yoruba material.
One distinctive aspect of Jaenicke’s public position is his repeated emphasis on provenance transparency and restitution debates. On several published object records, the gallery explicitly discusses issues surrounding export documentation, UNESCO conventions, ownership histories, and communication with scholars and restitution researchers. These statements reflect broader contemporary debates about the circulation of African cultural heritage, legality, collecting history, and museum acquisition practices.
The gallery maintains extensive online archives and catalogues documenting hundreds of African objects, including Benin and Ife bronzes, Nok terracottas, Dogon sculptures, Baule figures, Fon objects, Moba figures, and other West African material.
For researchers interested in the history of the African art trade, Jaenicke represents a later generation of dealers compared with figures such as John J. Klejman. Whereas Klejman belonged to the postwar New York market of the 1950s–1970s, Jaenicke’s work has been shaped by contemporary concerns with field documentation, provenance research, restitution discussions, digital archives, and direct engagement with West African networks and artists.
This text is based on AI Information
Moba Sculpture (Tchitcheri) - Northern Ghana, incl stand.
This exceptionally slender wooden figure is abstracted to the very edge of representation. Two narrow, splayed legs merge into an extremely elongated, gently curved body, whose natural curvature of the wood is deliberately incorporated into the composition. The arms appear merely as elongated, parallel slats. A small, spherical head without discernible features forms the understated crown. Notches, cracks, and a dark gray-brown, irregular surface preserve the traces of carving and aging. This radical reduction lends the figure a quiet, almost calligraphic monumentality.
Formally, the work belongs to the Moba tradition, whose settlement area extends across northeastern Ghana and northwestern Togo. Characteristic of this tradition are the tchitcheri: highly abstracted human figures carved from a single piece of wood, created at the behest of a diviner for personal, family, or communal shrines. Size and placement significantly determined their function: Large tchitcheri sakab could represent ancient clan ancestors and were set deep into the ground; medium-sized figures were more likely to be found in family shrine contexts. Without measurements or a confirmed provenance, the present figure cannot be definitively assigned to either of these categories.
Literature (selection)
Christine Mullen Kreamer: “Moba Shrine Figures”, African Arts 20/2, 1987, pp. 52–55, 82–83. AfricaBib
Christine Mullen Kreamer: “Seeing Between Worlds: A Moba Figure”, in: Frederick Lamp (ed.), See the Music, Hear the Dance, Munich 2004. Pacific Lutheran University
THE PHOTO
Between Aestheticization and Appropriation – The Tchitcheri through the Western Gaze
The photograph stages an encounter between two very different aesthetic and cultural orders. At its center, a cellist sits within a decaying, apparently European interior. The dramatic black-and-white composition, the long white dress, monumental mirror, streaming light, and billowing curtains create a romantic, melancholic, almost theatrical atmosphere. To the left stands an extremely slender, elongated wooden figure that formally recalls the tchitcheri of the Moba from northern Ghana and neighboring Togo described in the ethnological text. Its narrow, splayed legs, dramatically elongated body, reduced arms, and small spherical head correspond to the radical abstraction characteristic of this sculptural tradition.
Yet this juxtaposition is deeply ambivalent. The ethnological text makes clear that a tchitcheri was not originally conceived simply as an autonomous “sculpture.” Such figures were created at the request of a diviner and belonged to specific personal, familial, or communal shrine contexts. Size, placement, and location were integral to their meaning. Large tchitcheri sakab, for example, could represent ancient clan ancestors and were planted deeply into the ground. The object was therefore embedded within a social, spiritual, and spatial network of relationships.
The photograph performs precisely the transformation that has characterized much of the Western reception of African objects: a relational and ritually situated object becomes an autonomous aesthetic sculpture. The figure is placed on a pedestal, isolated vertically, and brought into dialogue with symbols of European high culture: the cello, classical musical tradition, elegant dress, and historic interior. At first, this may appear to constitute a form of recognition. The African figure is no longer presented as an ethnographic curiosity but as an artwork of equal formal significance. Yet this apparent elevation also contains a postcolonial problem.
The autonomous artwork, the pedestal, the white cube, the isolated museum display, and the emphasis on form, dating, provenance, and aesthetic quality are neither neutral nor universal modes of presentation. They have largely emerged from European histories of art and collecting. When a tchitcheri is removed from its original field of relationships and appreciated primarily for its abstraction, formal reduction, or “calligraphic monumentality,” a colonial hierarchy can paradoxically persist precisely where it appears to have been overcome. African objects are granted the status of “art” by being translated into the institutional categories of the Western art system.
The photograph makes this tension particularly visible. The cellist acts, performs, and occupies the compositional center. The Moba figure, by contrast, remains a silent and aestheticized counterpart. A blurred human presence also appears in the mirror, introducing a compelling relationship between body, sculpture, memory, and absence. At the same time, the composition can be read critically as a continuation of a Western regime of looking. The African object becomes an atmospheric sign while its original social and spiritual context disappears. Its perceived strangeness and formal radicalism intensify the aesthetic effect of an otherwise distinctly Western-coded setting.
This criticism can be extended to contemporary postcolonial museum practices. Many Western museums are now attempting to address colonial histories of acquisition, conduct provenance research, reconsider problematic terminology, and move away from presenting African objects merely as documents of supposedly “primitive” cultures. The problem arises when decolonization amounts primarily to transferring such objects from ethnographic contexts into the aesthetic framework of the art museum. The older hierarchy – in which European institutions retain the authority to determine what an African object is and how it should be seen – may then survive in a more sophisticated and aesthetically appealing form.
The contradiction becomes even more pronounced when Western museum and exhibition models are subsequently exported to Africa as supposedly universal standards. White-cube architecture, pedestals, vitrines, art-historical classifications, conservation standards, and the categories of the international art market can certainly contribute productively to African cultural institutions. They become problematic, however, when they displace other ways of engaging with objects or are presented as the only legitimate model of professional museology. This could constitute a new and subtler form of cultural colonization: instead of primarily removing objects from Africa and transporting them to Europe, Western categories of seeing, collecting, preserving, classifying, and assigning meaning are exported to Africa.
At the same time, this critique should not reproduce another colonial simplification by imagining “Africa” as possessing a single authentic and unchanging mode of presentation. African curators, artists, communities, and institutions actively appropriate, transform, and hybridize international museum practices. The decisive question is therefore not simply whether a pedestal, vitrine, or white cube is Western in origin. More important is who determines the conditions of presentation, who possesses interpretive authority, and which forms of knowledge are permitted to coexist alongside Western art-historical discourse.
The photograph can therefore be understood as an image of an unresolved postcolonial condition. Its considerable aesthetic power simultaneously depends upon an act of decontextualization: the tchitcheri is incorporated into a European romantic visual world and thereby made legible to a Western-trained aesthetic gaze. A genuinely decolonial presentation would have to move beyond this. It would ask not only where the figure comes from, but what relationships it once constituted, who has the authority to interpret it today, what meanings are lost through its musealization, and whether such an object was ever primarily intended to be looked at as “art.” Only then can aesthetic recognition become part of a deeper reconsideration of how cultural authority and the power to produce meaning continue to be distributed.
Some of the information and photos are generated by artificial intelligence and is based on published sources from the fields of ethnography, archaeology, and art history documents. All information and photos are protected by copyright.
Inv. No. MAZ29479
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.
------------
Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke is a Berlin-based gallery specializing in West African sculpture, bronzes, terracottas, masks, and contemporary African art. It is directed by Wolfgang Jaenicke, whose work combines collecting, dealing, provenance research, fieldwork, and archival documentation.
According to the gallery’s own account, Jaenicke studied ethnology, art history, and comparative law and has worked in the field of African art for more than twenty-five years. His activities developed through long-term engagement in countries including Mali, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Togo. Rather than presenting African art as a closed historical category, he describes it as a continuing cultural tradition shaped by living communities and changing historical contexts.
A particularly important phase of his career was in Mali, where he lived and worked between roughly 2002 and 2012 in Bamako and Ségou. There he operated Tribalartforum, a gallery that combined historical African sculpture with contemporary African photography, including works by Malick Sidibé. The political and military crisis in Mali in 2012 led to the closure of this phase of activity.
Later, together with Aguibou Kamaté, Jaenicke continued working from Lomé, Togo, before establishing a gallery presence in Berlin near Charlottenburg Palace. The gallery places particular emphasis on West African bronzes, terracottas, Benin and Ife-related works, Nok sculpture, Dogon art, Baule sculpture, Senufo objects, and Yoruba material.
One distinctive aspect of Jaenicke’s public position is his repeated emphasis on provenance transparency and restitution debates. On several published object records, the gallery explicitly discusses issues surrounding export documentation, UNESCO conventions, ownership histories, and communication with scholars and restitution researchers. These statements reflect broader contemporary debates about the circulation of African cultural heritage, legality, collecting history, and museum acquisition practices.
The gallery maintains extensive online archives and catalogues documenting hundreds of African objects, including Benin and Ife bronzes, Nok terracottas, Dogon sculptures, Baule figures, Fon objects, Moba figures, and other West African material.
For researchers interested in the history of the African art trade, Jaenicke represents a later generation of dealers compared with figures such as John J. Klejman. Whereas Klejman belonged to the postwar New York market of the 1950s–1970s, Jaenicke’s work has been shaped by contemporary concerns with field documentation, provenance research, restitution discussions, digital archives, and direct engagement with West African networks and artists.
This text is based on AI Information
Details
Ethnic group/ culture
Moba
Country of Origin
Ghana
Material
Wood
Sold with stand
Yes
Condition
Fair condition
Title of artwork
A wooden sculpture
Height
142 cm
Weight
4.6 kg
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
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