A wooden sculpture - Prampram - Ghana (No reserve price)
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A wooden sculpture from Ghana titled A wooden sculpture, in the Prampram style, a pair of figures from Southern Ghana, height 98 cm, weight 10.1 kg, in fair condition and sold with a stand.
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Description from the seller
Prampram Figure Pair - Southern Ghana, incl stand.
These two towering wooden figures are characterized by a radical formal reduction. From narrowly splayed legs emerge elongated, almost cylindrical bodies, from which thin arms hang close to the head. Long necks support disproportionately large, rounded heads. Eyes and mouth appear merely as small indentations, the nose as a narrow, incised or plastically suggested line. The chest and navel are also indicated by dot-like hollows. The matte, gray to earth-brown surface with occasional dark and reddish traces underscores the austere, archaic appearance of the figures. As a pair, the figures achieve a remarkable balance between individuality and repetition.
The rarely documented Prampram sculpture tradition is attributed to southeastern Ghana and the cultural context of Ningo-Prampram. Comparable figures are also characterized by elongated bodies, slender limbs, and large oval or spherical heads. Some documented provenances point to the storage of such sculptures in shrine contexts; for pieces from Lectsoboi, there is also a local tradition that connects them with historical warrior figures. However, this specific interpretation cannot be applied to the entire group of works, which has thus far received little scholarly attention. The original function of this pair should therefore remain open to question without a confirmed field provenance.
Literature (selection):
B. K. Dogbe: “The Human Form as a Central Theme in Art”, Image, Kumasi 1977.
Herbert M. Cole / Doran H. Ross: The Arts of Ghana. Los Angeles 1977.
Marion Kilson: Kpele Lala: Ga Religious Songs and Symbols. Cambridge, Mass. 1971.
THE PHOTO
Prampram Figure Pair – Southern Ghana
These two towering wooden figures are characterized by a radical formal reduction. From narrowly splayed legs emerge elongated, almost cylindrical bodies, with slender arms hanging close to the torso. Long necks support disproportionately large, rounded heads. Eyes and mouth appear merely as small indentations, while the nose is reduced to a narrow incised or subtly modelled line. The chest and navel are likewise indicated by dot-like hollows. Their matte surfaces, ranging from grey to earth brown with occasional dark and reddish traces, reinforce the figures’ austere and archaic presence. As a pair, they establish a remarkable balance between repetition and individuality.
The rarely documented Prampram sculptural tradition is attributed to southeastern Ghana and the cultural context of Ningo-Prampram. Comparable figures are likewise distinguished by elongated bodies, slender limbs, and large oval or spherical heads. Some documented provenances suggest that such sculptures were kept in shrine contexts; for works from Lectsoboi, local traditions have also associated them with historical warrior figures. This interpretation, however, cannot be extended to the group as a whole, which has so far received comparatively little scholarly attention. Without a confirmed field provenance, the original function of this particular pair should therefore remain an open question.
The photographic staging places the figures within an intentionally different visual environment. Ochre, deep blue, brick red, and muted white, together with the rigorous geometry of stairs, walls, openings, and cast shadows, evoke the chromatic and spatial vocabulary associated with Oskar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus. The architectural setting turns the image into a stage: one figure stands frontally at the top of the staircase, while the other appears farther away, silhouetted against an illuminated opening. Schlemmer’s exploration of the human figure in relation to geometry, architecture, and the stage inevitably comes to mind.
Yet this resemblance belongs to the image created here, not to the historical identity of the sculptures themselves. It should neither imply a historical connection nor suggest that the Prampram figures can be understood as anticipating a Bauhaus aesthetic. Their historical timelines, cultural contexts, possible functions, and systems of meaning are fundamentally different.
This distinction is particularly important in light of the history of European modernism. African works were repeatedly detached from their specific social, ritual, intellectual, and historical contexts and reframed as sources of a supposedly universal or “primitive” formal language through which European modernism could define its own innovations. The present juxtaposition seeks explicitly not to repeat that gesture of appropriation. It does not claim influence, descent, or equivalence. Instead, it constructs a temporary visual encounter between two autonomous histories of form.
The affinities that become visible—elongation, reduction of the human body to elementary volumes, the tension between figure and architecture, repetition and variation—are therefore best understood as formal resonances produced by the photograph itself. The Bauhaus-inflected architecture belongs to the contemporary act of staging. The Prampram figures enter this space with their own material and cultural history, one that cannot be subsumed under the categories of twentieth-century European abstraction.
Seen through Horst Bredekamp’s concept of the Bildakt (image act), the photograph consequently becomes more than a neutral setting or documentary representation. The image itself produces relations. Through perspective, colour, illumination, scale, and spatial distance, it activates the two sculptures as protagonists. The elevated figure confronts the viewer from the threshold above the staircase; the second, placed deep within the architecture and caught in backlight, appears simultaneously present and remote. Architecture, sculpture, light, and shadow together generate an event of seeing.
At the same time, the figures resist complete absorption into this carefully constructed aesthetic order. Their unusual proportions, material surfaces, and unresolved original functions retain a degree of opacity. They cannot simply be transformed into “Bauhaus figures.” In Bredekamp’s sense, their presence may instead be understood as possessing an agency within the image: they do not merely receive the meaning imposed by their surroundings but alter the space into which they have been placed and, in doing so, act back upon the viewer.
The photograph can thus be understood as an experiment in proximity without assimilation. It brings historically and culturally distinct visual systems into a momentary constellation while insisting on the distance between them. The comparison does not establish a genealogy. Rather, it allows similarity and difference to become perceptible at the same time. What emerges is not an image of African sculpture absorbed into the history of European modernism, but a visual encounter in which the Prampram figures maintain their autonomy—and through their presence transform the very modernist space that was constructed around them.
Literature (selection):
B. K. Dogbe, “The Human Form as a Central Theme in Art,” Image, Kumasi, 1977.
Herbert M. Cole / Doran H. Ross, The Arts of Ghana, Los Angeles, 1977.
Marion Kilson, Kpele Lala: Ga Religious Songs and Symbols, Cambridge, Mass., 1971.
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. MAZ29533
Height: 97 cm / 98 cm
Weight: 4,5 kg / 5,6 kg (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.
------------
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
Prampram Figure Pair - Southern Ghana, incl stand.
These two towering wooden figures are characterized by a radical formal reduction. From narrowly splayed legs emerge elongated, almost cylindrical bodies, from which thin arms hang close to the head. Long necks support disproportionately large, rounded heads. Eyes and mouth appear merely as small indentations, the nose as a narrow, incised or plastically suggested line. The chest and navel are also indicated by dot-like hollows. The matte, gray to earth-brown surface with occasional dark and reddish traces underscores the austere, archaic appearance of the figures. As a pair, the figures achieve a remarkable balance between individuality and repetition.
The rarely documented Prampram sculpture tradition is attributed to southeastern Ghana and the cultural context of Ningo-Prampram. Comparable figures are also characterized by elongated bodies, slender limbs, and large oval or spherical heads. Some documented provenances point to the storage of such sculptures in shrine contexts; for pieces from Lectsoboi, there is also a local tradition that connects them with historical warrior figures. However, this specific interpretation cannot be applied to the entire group of works, which has thus far received little scholarly attention. The original function of this pair should therefore remain open to question without a confirmed field provenance.
Literature (selection):
B. K. Dogbe: “The Human Form as a Central Theme in Art”, Image, Kumasi 1977.
Herbert M. Cole / Doran H. Ross: The Arts of Ghana. Los Angeles 1977.
Marion Kilson: Kpele Lala: Ga Religious Songs and Symbols. Cambridge, Mass. 1971.
THE PHOTO
Prampram Figure Pair – Southern Ghana
These two towering wooden figures are characterized by a radical formal reduction. From narrowly splayed legs emerge elongated, almost cylindrical bodies, with slender arms hanging close to the torso. Long necks support disproportionately large, rounded heads. Eyes and mouth appear merely as small indentations, while the nose is reduced to a narrow incised or subtly modelled line. The chest and navel are likewise indicated by dot-like hollows. Their matte surfaces, ranging from grey to earth brown with occasional dark and reddish traces, reinforce the figures’ austere and archaic presence. As a pair, they establish a remarkable balance between repetition and individuality.
The rarely documented Prampram sculptural tradition is attributed to southeastern Ghana and the cultural context of Ningo-Prampram. Comparable figures are likewise distinguished by elongated bodies, slender limbs, and large oval or spherical heads. Some documented provenances suggest that such sculptures were kept in shrine contexts; for works from Lectsoboi, local traditions have also associated them with historical warrior figures. This interpretation, however, cannot be extended to the group as a whole, which has so far received comparatively little scholarly attention. Without a confirmed field provenance, the original function of this particular pair should therefore remain an open question.
The photographic staging places the figures within an intentionally different visual environment. Ochre, deep blue, brick red, and muted white, together with the rigorous geometry of stairs, walls, openings, and cast shadows, evoke the chromatic and spatial vocabulary associated with Oskar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus. The architectural setting turns the image into a stage: one figure stands frontally at the top of the staircase, while the other appears farther away, silhouetted against an illuminated opening. Schlemmer’s exploration of the human figure in relation to geometry, architecture, and the stage inevitably comes to mind.
Yet this resemblance belongs to the image created here, not to the historical identity of the sculptures themselves. It should neither imply a historical connection nor suggest that the Prampram figures can be understood as anticipating a Bauhaus aesthetic. Their historical timelines, cultural contexts, possible functions, and systems of meaning are fundamentally different.
This distinction is particularly important in light of the history of European modernism. African works were repeatedly detached from their specific social, ritual, intellectual, and historical contexts and reframed as sources of a supposedly universal or “primitive” formal language through which European modernism could define its own innovations. The present juxtaposition seeks explicitly not to repeat that gesture of appropriation. It does not claim influence, descent, or equivalence. Instead, it constructs a temporary visual encounter between two autonomous histories of form.
The affinities that become visible—elongation, reduction of the human body to elementary volumes, the tension between figure and architecture, repetition and variation—are therefore best understood as formal resonances produced by the photograph itself. The Bauhaus-inflected architecture belongs to the contemporary act of staging. The Prampram figures enter this space with their own material and cultural history, one that cannot be subsumed under the categories of twentieth-century European abstraction.
Seen through Horst Bredekamp’s concept of the Bildakt (image act), the photograph consequently becomes more than a neutral setting or documentary representation. The image itself produces relations. Through perspective, colour, illumination, scale, and spatial distance, it activates the two sculptures as protagonists. The elevated figure confronts the viewer from the threshold above the staircase; the second, placed deep within the architecture and caught in backlight, appears simultaneously present and remote. Architecture, sculpture, light, and shadow together generate an event of seeing.
At the same time, the figures resist complete absorption into this carefully constructed aesthetic order. Their unusual proportions, material surfaces, and unresolved original functions retain a degree of opacity. They cannot simply be transformed into “Bauhaus figures.” In Bredekamp’s sense, their presence may instead be understood as possessing an agency within the image: they do not merely receive the meaning imposed by their surroundings but alter the space into which they have been placed and, in doing so, act back upon the viewer.
The photograph can thus be understood as an experiment in proximity without assimilation. It brings historically and culturally distinct visual systems into a momentary constellation while insisting on the distance between them. The comparison does not establish a genealogy. Rather, it allows similarity and difference to become perceptible at the same time. What emerges is not an image of African sculpture absorbed into the history of European modernism, but a visual encounter in which the Prampram figures maintain their autonomy—and through their presence transform the very modernist space that was constructed around them.
Literature (selection):
B. K. Dogbe, “The Human Form as a Central Theme in Art,” Image, Kumasi, 1977.
Herbert M. Cole / Doran H. Ross, The Arts of Ghana, Los Angeles, 1977.
Marion Kilson, Kpele Lala: Ga Religious Songs and Symbols, Cambridge, Mass., 1971.
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. MAZ29533
Height: 97 cm / 98 cm
Weight: 4,5 kg / 5,6 kg (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.
------------
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
Prampram
Country of Origin
Ghana
Material
Wood
Sold with stand
Yes
Condition
Fair condition
Title of artwork
A wooden sculpture
Height
98 cm
Weight
10.1 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
AGB
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