A wooden sculpture - Yoruba - Nigeria (No reserve price)
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Selected by Julien Gauthier
A decade of experience in historical arms, armour, and African art.
Estimate € 280 - € 350
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Wooden sculpture from the Yoruba Ilorin region of Nigeria, titled “A wooden sculpture”, adornment of cowrie shells, fiber and cords, with a 31 cm height and 710 g weight, in fair condition and not sold with a stand.
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Description from the seller
Yoruba Power Figure, Ilorin Region, Nigeria
Yoruba, Ilorin region, Nigeria
Wood, cowrie shells, fiber, cord and applied ritual materials
This imposing Yoruba figure from the Ilorin region is distinguished by the extraordinary accumulation of cowrie shells and other materials covering much of the carved wooden body. The underlying sculpture remains clearly visible in the head, shoulders, arms, hands and feet, while the torso and back have been transformed by dense layers of attachments. The result is an object in which carving and ritual assemblage are inseparable.
The head is large in relation to the body and displays a powerful, highly individualized expression. A tall forehead leads to a carefully grooved coiffure. The eyes are prominently modeled and surrounded by sharply defined contours, while the long triangular nose projects strongly from the facial plane. The mouth is indicated by a narrow horizontal opening above a projecting chin.
Particularly striking are the deeply incised marks on the cheeks and around the mouth. These parallel and elongated cuts evoke the extensive vocabulary of facial markings historically found among Yoruba communities. Such marks could communicate identity, lineage, locality, status or aesthetic ideals, but their precise significance varies considerably and should not be assigned to a particular subgroup solely from the photograph.
The body is comparatively compact. The arms descend vertically at either side, terminating in clenched or strongly abbreviated hands. Both wrists are surrounded by multiple strands of twisted fiber or cord. Similar heavy bindings encircle the ankles immediately above the feet. A further cord passes horizontally across the abdomen and around the figure.
Most remarkable is the mass of cowrie shells covering the torso. They are arranged in dense vertical clusters extending from the chest toward the abdomen and continuing around the sides and back. Individual shells remain clearly recognizable, but through repetition they form an almost armor-like second body around the wooden figure. Additional materials are gathered around the neck and behind the head.
The rear assemblage rises prominently behind the figure, creating a second vertical mass almost parallel to the back of the head. From the side, this element substantially changes the silhouette and demonstrates that the sculpture was conceived to operate spatially rather than merely frontally. The distinction between carved image and accumulated ritual materials is therefore fundamental to the object's appearance.
Cowrie shells possessed considerable economic and symbolic importance in West Africa. They circulated as currency and consequently became closely associated with wealth, value and exchange. Within religious contexts, however, cowries could acquire additional meanings and are particularly familiar from divination equipment, garments, shrine objects and personal regalia. Their presence here should consequently not be reduced to simple decoration.
Regional characteristics
Ilorin occupies a particularly important position in the cultural geography of Nigeria. Situated at the northern edge of the Yoruba-speaking world, the city developed as a major point of interaction between Yoruba communities and populations connected with the wider Niger and savanna regions. Its artistic traditions consequently reflect a history of cultural exchange rather than an isolated regional style.
This position makes the Ilorin attribution especially significant. Yoruba artistic and religious traditions remained important in the region, while the city's historical connections with northern Nigeria introduced additional social and cultural influences. Objects collected around Ilorin therefore deserve to be considered within this complex frontier environment rather than being treated automatically as representative of a generalized Yoruba style.
The present figure belongs broadly to the category of empowered ritual objects in which an initially carved sculpture was materially transformed through subsequent additions. Within Yoruba religious practice, the efficacy of an object could depend not simply upon the sculptor's original work but upon substances, attachments, bindings and ritual actions applied after carving. Such additions could fundamentally alter both the appearance and status of the sculpture.
The extraordinary concentration of cowries is particularly relevant in this respect. Their multiplication creates a visible statement of abundance and accumulated value. At the same time, the bindings around the wrists, torso and ankles suggest that containment and attachment were integral to the object's conception. In many West African ritual systems, binding can express the fixing, concentrating or controlling of spiritual potency. Nevertheless, the precise meaning of these bindings on this individual figure cannot be established without information about its original shrine context.
The facial scarification and elaborate coiffure provide another important layer of identity. Yoruba sculpture often places particular emphasis upon the head, reflecting the wider importance of ori—the head as the locus of individuality, destiny and personal spiritual potential. Here the monumental head remains largely unobstructed by the accumulated materials, ensuring that the figure's identity continues to dominate the composition.
The object should not automatically be identified with a specific Yoruba deity such as Eshu, Ogun, Shango or another orisha. Neither the cowries nor the bindings alone provide sufficient evidence for such an attribution. Similarly, identifying the sculpture specifically as a divination figure, ancestor image or protective object would require further documentation.
What can be stated more securely is that the sculpture presents an exceptional example of the transformation of a carved human figure through accumulated ritual material. The original wooden body provides the permanent structural core, while cowries, cords and other additions record another dimension of the object's life. Its present appearance is therefore the product not only of a sculptor but also of subsequent acts of attachment and use.
Visually, this accumulation produces a compelling opposition. The face is controlled, geometric and clearly legible, whereas the torso becomes dense, irregular and tactile. Smoothly carved limbs emerge from an almost organic mass of shells and bindings. The result is a sculpture whose physical complexity conveys an impression of concentrated potency particularly appropriate to the ritual arts of the wider Yoruba cultural sphere.
Selected Literature
Drewal, Henry John, John Pemberton III and Rowland Abiodun. Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought. New York: Center for African Art, 1989.
Fagg, William, and John Pemberton III. Yoruba: Sculpture of West Africa. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
Abiodun, Rowland. Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Thompson, Robert Farris. Black Gods and Kings: Yoruba Art at UCLA. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971.
Drewal, Henry John, and Margaret Thompson Drewal. Gelede: Art and Female Power among the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.
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. MAZ30855
Informant: Batoure
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
Yoruba Power Figure, Ilorin Region, Nigeria
Yoruba, Ilorin region, Nigeria
Wood, cowrie shells, fiber, cord and applied ritual materials
This imposing Yoruba figure from the Ilorin region is distinguished by the extraordinary accumulation of cowrie shells and other materials covering much of the carved wooden body. The underlying sculpture remains clearly visible in the head, shoulders, arms, hands and feet, while the torso and back have been transformed by dense layers of attachments. The result is an object in which carving and ritual assemblage are inseparable.
The head is large in relation to the body and displays a powerful, highly individualized expression. A tall forehead leads to a carefully grooved coiffure. The eyes are prominently modeled and surrounded by sharply defined contours, while the long triangular nose projects strongly from the facial plane. The mouth is indicated by a narrow horizontal opening above a projecting chin.
Particularly striking are the deeply incised marks on the cheeks and around the mouth. These parallel and elongated cuts evoke the extensive vocabulary of facial markings historically found among Yoruba communities. Such marks could communicate identity, lineage, locality, status or aesthetic ideals, but their precise significance varies considerably and should not be assigned to a particular subgroup solely from the photograph.
The body is comparatively compact. The arms descend vertically at either side, terminating in clenched or strongly abbreviated hands. Both wrists are surrounded by multiple strands of twisted fiber or cord. Similar heavy bindings encircle the ankles immediately above the feet. A further cord passes horizontally across the abdomen and around the figure.
Most remarkable is the mass of cowrie shells covering the torso. They are arranged in dense vertical clusters extending from the chest toward the abdomen and continuing around the sides and back. Individual shells remain clearly recognizable, but through repetition they form an almost armor-like second body around the wooden figure. Additional materials are gathered around the neck and behind the head.
The rear assemblage rises prominently behind the figure, creating a second vertical mass almost parallel to the back of the head. From the side, this element substantially changes the silhouette and demonstrates that the sculpture was conceived to operate spatially rather than merely frontally. The distinction between carved image and accumulated ritual materials is therefore fundamental to the object's appearance.
Cowrie shells possessed considerable economic and symbolic importance in West Africa. They circulated as currency and consequently became closely associated with wealth, value and exchange. Within religious contexts, however, cowries could acquire additional meanings and are particularly familiar from divination equipment, garments, shrine objects and personal regalia. Their presence here should consequently not be reduced to simple decoration.
Regional characteristics
Ilorin occupies a particularly important position in the cultural geography of Nigeria. Situated at the northern edge of the Yoruba-speaking world, the city developed as a major point of interaction between Yoruba communities and populations connected with the wider Niger and savanna regions. Its artistic traditions consequently reflect a history of cultural exchange rather than an isolated regional style.
This position makes the Ilorin attribution especially significant. Yoruba artistic and religious traditions remained important in the region, while the city's historical connections with northern Nigeria introduced additional social and cultural influences. Objects collected around Ilorin therefore deserve to be considered within this complex frontier environment rather than being treated automatically as representative of a generalized Yoruba style.
The present figure belongs broadly to the category of empowered ritual objects in which an initially carved sculpture was materially transformed through subsequent additions. Within Yoruba religious practice, the efficacy of an object could depend not simply upon the sculptor's original work but upon substances, attachments, bindings and ritual actions applied after carving. Such additions could fundamentally alter both the appearance and status of the sculpture.
The extraordinary concentration of cowries is particularly relevant in this respect. Their multiplication creates a visible statement of abundance and accumulated value. At the same time, the bindings around the wrists, torso and ankles suggest that containment and attachment were integral to the object's conception. In many West African ritual systems, binding can express the fixing, concentrating or controlling of spiritual potency. Nevertheless, the precise meaning of these bindings on this individual figure cannot be established without information about its original shrine context.
The facial scarification and elaborate coiffure provide another important layer of identity. Yoruba sculpture often places particular emphasis upon the head, reflecting the wider importance of ori—the head as the locus of individuality, destiny and personal spiritual potential. Here the monumental head remains largely unobstructed by the accumulated materials, ensuring that the figure's identity continues to dominate the composition.
The object should not automatically be identified with a specific Yoruba deity such as Eshu, Ogun, Shango or another orisha. Neither the cowries nor the bindings alone provide sufficient evidence for such an attribution. Similarly, identifying the sculpture specifically as a divination figure, ancestor image or protective object would require further documentation.
What can be stated more securely is that the sculpture presents an exceptional example of the transformation of a carved human figure through accumulated ritual material. The original wooden body provides the permanent structural core, while cowries, cords and other additions record another dimension of the object's life. Its present appearance is therefore the product not only of a sculptor but also of subsequent acts of attachment and use.
Visually, this accumulation produces a compelling opposition. The face is controlled, geometric and clearly legible, whereas the torso becomes dense, irregular and tactile. Smoothly carved limbs emerge from an almost organic mass of shells and bindings. The result is a sculpture whose physical complexity conveys an impression of concentrated potency particularly appropriate to the ritual arts of the wider Yoruba cultural sphere.
Selected Literature
Drewal, Henry John, John Pemberton III and Rowland Abiodun. Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought. New York: Center for African Art, 1989.
Fagg, William, and John Pemberton III. Yoruba: Sculpture of West Africa. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
Abiodun, Rowland. Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Thompson, Robert Farris. Black Gods and Kings: Yoruba Art at UCLA. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971.
Drewal, Henry John, and Margaret Thompson Drewal. Gelede: Art and Female Power among the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.
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. MAZ30855
Informant: Batoure
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
Yoruba
Country of Origin
Nigeria
Material
Wood
Sold with stand
No
Condition
Fair condition
Title of artwork
A wooden sculpture
Height
31 cm
Weight
710 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
