A bronze sculpture - Ekiti - Nigeria (No reserve price)
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A bronze sculpture from Nigeria titled A bronze sculpture, attributed to Ekiti from Ebu village in the Asaba region, with a height of 18 cm, weight 590 g, in fair condition.
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Description from the seller
Ekiti Bronze Guinea Fowl, Ebu Village, Asaba Region, Nigeria
Ekiti attribution, Ebu village, Asaba region, Nigeria
Cast copper alloy
This elegant copper-alloy sculpture represents a guinea fowl, recognizable by its compact body, long legs, relatively small head and distinctive upright cranial projection. The bird has been reduced to a remarkably economical sculptural vocabulary, yet its essential character remains immediately legible. The elongated neck, swelling body and animated tail create a strong silhouette, while the narrow legs give the comparatively massive body an impression of alertness and lightness.
The head is particularly expressive. A tall, vertically projecting crest rises prominently above it, while small modeled elements articulate the face and sides of the head. The beak projects forward and downward in a pronounced curve. Beneath it, additional rounded forms suggest the wattles characteristic of the guinea fowl. Rather than pursuing strict ornithological naturalism, the caster has selected and amplified those features that make the bird recognizable.
The neck forms an elegant transition between the small head and the broad body. Its subtle curvature gives the sculpture a sense of upward movement, reinforced by the erect head and crest. The body itself is conceived as a smooth, compressed oval volume. This simplicity is contrasted by narrow raised and incised passages along the wings, which indicate plumage without covering the entire surface with feather patterns.
At the rear, the tail divides into several projecting elements. These flare outward and upward, providing an effective counterweight to the head and neck. The resulting profile is particularly successful: the vertical thrust of the head is balanced by the horizontal movement of the tail, while the rounded body occupies the visual center.
Two long, slender legs descend from the body and terminate in extended feet. Their simplified construction emphasizes the essential geometry of the bird rather than anatomical detail. The relative delicacy of these legs is also technically noteworthy, since such projecting elements require considerable control in lost-wax casting.
The surface ranges from deep brown to nearly black, with warmer metallic passages appearing along projecting areas and edges. Small areas of greenish oxidation are visible, consistent with a copper-alloy composition. The irregularities and tonal variations of the surface contribute significantly to the sculpture's character, emphasizing the contrast between the broad body and the more finely modeled extremities.
Regional characteristics
The supplied attribution combines “Ekiti” with Ebu village in the Asaba region. This deserves some qualification. Ekiti is principally associated with the northeastern Yoruba-speaking area considerably farther west, whereas Asaba and its surrounding communities belong to the culturally complex western Niger region of present-day Delta State. Ebu itself lies within this wider area of interaction.
For this reason, “Ekiti” should be retained as the recorded attribution rather than interpreted automatically as a conventional Ekiti-Yoruba stylistic classification. The middle and lower Niger regions have historically been characterized by extensive movement of people, objects, metals and artistic technologies. Edo, Igbo, Yoruba and other cultural spheres interacted across these networks, making rigid stylistic boundaries particularly problematic for undocumented metal objects.
Animal imagery occupies an important place in the arts of southern Nigeria. Birds can appear in courtly, domestic, commemorative and ritual contexts, and individual species may acquire different associations according to locality and circumstances. The guinea fowl is especially recognizable through its distinctive bodily form and has long been familiar as both a domestic and hunted bird across West Africa.
Its cultural significance should nevertheless not be reduced to a single universal symbolism. Depending upon context, birds may participate in ideas concerning prestige, sacrifice, abundance, communication with spiritual forces or proverbial knowledge. Without documentation concerning the original ownership and use of this particular sculpture, assigning it a specific ritual meaning would be speculative.
The sculptor's treatment of the bird is especially interesting because it differs fundamentally from the dense ornamental approach encountered on many anthropomorphic copper-alloy figures from southern Nigeria. Here the broad body is deliberately restrained. Surface decoration is concentrated around the wings and head, allowing the smooth convex volume of the torso to dominate.
This economy gives the work an unusually modern sculptural presence. Seen in profile, almost every component contributes to the overall contour: the vertical crest, curved beak, narrow neck, elliptical body, raised tail and long legs form a continuous rhythmic sequence. The bird is therefore convincing not because of minute naturalistic detail but because its characteristic posture has been distilled into a few strongly articulated forms.
The identification as a pintade—guinea fowl—is consistent with the visible morphology, particularly the upright head ornament, wattled facial structure and compact galliform body. At the same time, the work demonstrates how an observed animal could be transformed through casting into an emblematic sculptural image.
Within the supplied Ebu/Asaba context, the piece is particularly valuable as evidence of the diversity of regional copper-alloy traditions beyond the much better documented royal casting centers. Its combination of technical simplicity, confident modeling and highly recognizable silhouette gives the sculpture considerable individuality.
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.
Abiodun, Rowland. Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Berns, Marla C., Richard Fardon and Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, eds. Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2011.
Cole, Herbert M., and Chike C. Aniakor. Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos. Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984.
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. MAZ31092
Informant: Amadou Dogo
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
Ekiti Bronze Guinea Fowl, Ebu Village, Asaba Region, Nigeria
Ekiti attribution, Ebu village, Asaba region, Nigeria
Cast copper alloy
This elegant copper-alloy sculpture represents a guinea fowl, recognizable by its compact body, long legs, relatively small head and distinctive upright cranial projection. The bird has been reduced to a remarkably economical sculptural vocabulary, yet its essential character remains immediately legible. The elongated neck, swelling body and animated tail create a strong silhouette, while the narrow legs give the comparatively massive body an impression of alertness and lightness.
The head is particularly expressive. A tall, vertically projecting crest rises prominently above it, while small modeled elements articulate the face and sides of the head. The beak projects forward and downward in a pronounced curve. Beneath it, additional rounded forms suggest the wattles characteristic of the guinea fowl. Rather than pursuing strict ornithological naturalism, the caster has selected and amplified those features that make the bird recognizable.
The neck forms an elegant transition between the small head and the broad body. Its subtle curvature gives the sculpture a sense of upward movement, reinforced by the erect head and crest. The body itself is conceived as a smooth, compressed oval volume. This simplicity is contrasted by narrow raised and incised passages along the wings, which indicate plumage without covering the entire surface with feather patterns.
At the rear, the tail divides into several projecting elements. These flare outward and upward, providing an effective counterweight to the head and neck. The resulting profile is particularly successful: the vertical thrust of the head is balanced by the horizontal movement of the tail, while the rounded body occupies the visual center.
Two long, slender legs descend from the body and terminate in extended feet. Their simplified construction emphasizes the essential geometry of the bird rather than anatomical detail. The relative delicacy of these legs is also technically noteworthy, since such projecting elements require considerable control in lost-wax casting.
The surface ranges from deep brown to nearly black, with warmer metallic passages appearing along projecting areas and edges. Small areas of greenish oxidation are visible, consistent with a copper-alloy composition. The irregularities and tonal variations of the surface contribute significantly to the sculpture's character, emphasizing the contrast between the broad body and the more finely modeled extremities.
Regional characteristics
The supplied attribution combines “Ekiti” with Ebu village in the Asaba region. This deserves some qualification. Ekiti is principally associated with the northeastern Yoruba-speaking area considerably farther west, whereas Asaba and its surrounding communities belong to the culturally complex western Niger region of present-day Delta State. Ebu itself lies within this wider area of interaction.
For this reason, “Ekiti” should be retained as the recorded attribution rather than interpreted automatically as a conventional Ekiti-Yoruba stylistic classification. The middle and lower Niger regions have historically been characterized by extensive movement of people, objects, metals and artistic technologies. Edo, Igbo, Yoruba and other cultural spheres interacted across these networks, making rigid stylistic boundaries particularly problematic for undocumented metal objects.
Animal imagery occupies an important place in the arts of southern Nigeria. Birds can appear in courtly, domestic, commemorative and ritual contexts, and individual species may acquire different associations according to locality and circumstances. The guinea fowl is especially recognizable through its distinctive bodily form and has long been familiar as both a domestic and hunted bird across West Africa.
Its cultural significance should nevertheless not be reduced to a single universal symbolism. Depending upon context, birds may participate in ideas concerning prestige, sacrifice, abundance, communication with spiritual forces or proverbial knowledge. Without documentation concerning the original ownership and use of this particular sculpture, assigning it a specific ritual meaning would be speculative.
The sculptor's treatment of the bird is especially interesting because it differs fundamentally from the dense ornamental approach encountered on many anthropomorphic copper-alloy figures from southern Nigeria. Here the broad body is deliberately restrained. Surface decoration is concentrated around the wings and head, allowing the smooth convex volume of the torso to dominate.
This economy gives the work an unusually modern sculptural presence. Seen in profile, almost every component contributes to the overall contour: the vertical crest, curved beak, narrow neck, elliptical body, raised tail and long legs form a continuous rhythmic sequence. The bird is therefore convincing not because of minute naturalistic detail but because its characteristic posture has been distilled into a few strongly articulated forms.
The identification as a pintade—guinea fowl—is consistent with the visible morphology, particularly the upright head ornament, wattled facial structure and compact galliform body. At the same time, the work demonstrates how an observed animal could be transformed through casting into an emblematic sculptural image.
Within the supplied Ebu/Asaba context, the piece is particularly valuable as evidence of the diversity of regional copper-alloy traditions beyond the much better documented royal casting centers. Its combination of technical simplicity, confident modeling and highly recognizable silhouette gives the sculpture considerable individuality.
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.
Abiodun, Rowland. Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Berns, Marla C., Richard Fardon and Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, eds. Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2011.
Cole, Herbert M., and Chike C. Aniakor. Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos. Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984.
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. MAZ31092
Informant: Amadou Dogo
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
Ekiti
Country of Origin
Nigeria
Material
Bronze
Sold with stand
No
Condition
Fair condition
Title of artwork
A bronze sculpture
Height
18 cm
Weight
590 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
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