A wooden sculpture - Koussasse - Togo (No reserve price)
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Selected by Dimitri André
Holds a postgraduate degree in African studies and 15 years experience in African art.
Estimate € 210 - € 250
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A wooden sculpture titled “A wooden sculpture” from Togo, attributed to the Koussasse (Kusasi) people, with provenance in the Savannah Region of Northern Togo.
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Description from the seller
Sculpture Koussasse – Anthropomorphic Ancestor or Guardian Figure
Origin: Savannah Region, Northern Togo
Cultural Attribution: Koussasse (Kusasi), attributed
Material: Wood, carved, with a natural, heavily weathered surface, incl stand.
Description
This anthropomorphic wooden sculpture from the savannah region of northern Togo is characterized by an exceptionally minimalist design, a strictly vertical body structure, and an impressive surface marked by natural aging processes. The upright figure is carved from a single piece of wood and has a large, nearly spherical head that rests directly on a narrow neck. The face is reduced to a few, sparsely carved features. Two small, sunken eyes mark the front of the head, while the nose and mouth appear barely or indistinctly defined. The smooth, slightly domed forehead transitions into a rounded skullcap, the surface of which is crisscrossed by deep longitudinal cracks. Below the head, an elongated, slightly conical torso develops, its outline reminiscent of a narrow, downward-curving cylinder. Arms, hands, and anatomical details of the upper body are not discernible. Rather, the body forms a closed, sculptural unit, which only dissolves in the lower section into two long, nearly parallel legs. These are separated by a deep gap and end without sculpted feet. The light brown to grayish-brown wooden surface shows pronounced signs of erosion, deep cracks, irregular breaks, and areas of darker discoloration. The vertical wood grain is particularly prominent on the torso and legs. The surface suggests prolonged exposure to climatic influences, although the photographic evidence alone does not allow for the determination of either the duration of these influences or the original display conditions. The current black display base is clearly not part of the original sculptural concept.
Cultural and Geographical Context
The population groups known as Koussasse or Kusasi are primarily located in northeastern Ghana and adjacent areas of Burkina Faso. The owner's stated origin in the savannah region of northern Togo thus points to a broader West African cultural sphere, whose historical relationships are characterized by migration, trade, and cultural exchange. A definitive attribution of the sculpture to the Kusasi cannot be confirmed based solely on its formal characteristics. Northern Togo is an ethnically and culturally diverse region where, among others, the Moba, Konkomba, Tchokossi, Bimoba, and other communities have developed distinct traditions of figurative wood carving. Particularly in northern Togo and the adjacent regions of Burkina Faso and Ghana, highly abstracted anthropomorphic wooden figures are known, whose meaning is often linked to ancestor worship, familial protection rituals, and the relationship between the living and the dead. In these religious systems, material representations can serve as memorials, objects of protection, or components of cultic installations. Their effectiveness, however, is not necessarily determined by a naturalistic rendering of the human body. Rather, the sculptural presence of a figure can arise from its ritual integration, its placement, and its ascribed relationship to supernatural entities. The present sculpture can be formally placed within this broader context, without this proving a specific original function.
Symbolism and Possible Ritual Function
The striking simplification of the human form opens up various possibilities for interpretation. The disproportionately large head could allude to a special significance of the head as a bearer of personality, memory, or spiritual identity. In numerous West African traditions, the head holds a prominent symbolic position, but it would be methodologically inadmissible to directly derive a specific religious message for the present figure from this. The missing arms and the largely closed body form lend the representation a decidedly static character. Instead of an acting or gesturing person, a resting, self-contained figure appears. This formal restraint could be compatible with its function as an ancestral representation or protective figure. An original placement within a family cult area, at a shrine, or at another ritually significant site is conceivable. Its use in connection with local earth or ancestor cults can also be considered within a broader regional context. However, ethnographic data that could substantiate such an interpretation for this specific object are lacking. The severe weathering could indicate prolonged exposure to the elements, as is documented for certain ritual wooden figures in the savanna region. Likewise, storage conditions or other subsequent influences could be responsible for its current state of preservation. The designation as an ancestral or protective figure should therefore be understood as a cautious functional hypothesis and not as a definitive classification.
Art Historical Analysis
The sculpture embodies a consistently abstract conception of the human figure, in which anatomical differentiation recedes in favor of a clear, elemental overall form. Its composition is based on three main sculptural elements: the spherical head, the elongated, slightly conical torso, and the two slender legs. These elements are connected without pronounced transitions and form a strictly vertical unity. The reduction of the face to two small depressions reinforces the impression of a deliberately restrained individualization. The head derives its expressiveness less from physiognomic details than from its size, its closed curve, and its position within the overall composition. The torso appears almost architectural, its form reminiscent of an upright wooden post. This affinity between human representation and the elemental post form can be observed in various sculptural traditions of the West African savannah regions. In particular, the wooden figures of the Moba people in northern Togo offer an important art-historical point of comparison with regard to their simplified conception of the body. The so-called tchitcheri of the Moba are often characterized by simplified human forms, elongated bodies, and a strong emphasis on the vertical axis. Such formal parallels are revealing for comparative analysis but do not justify an automatic reclassification of the present figure. Its cultural origin remains open, considering the traditional name Koussasse and the regional stylistic overlaps. The interplay between the original carving and the current, heavily eroded wooden surface is particularly noteworthy. Deep cracks, eroded areas, and irregular material losses lend the object an additional sculptural texture that partially obscures its original form. The resulting aesthetic effect should not be equated with a demonstrable artistic intention.
Art Historical Assessment
The particular quality of this sculpture lies in its radical formal concentration. With just a few sculptural interventions, a human figure of remarkable presence emerges. The large, almost closed head, the columnar body, and the slender legs form a composition whose effect derives primarily from proportion, rhythm, and materiality. The heavily weathered surface lends the figure an additional historical dimension, without allowing for a precise dating. In the context of figurative wood carving from the West African savannah belt, the object illustrates an aesthetic approach in which the human form is reduced to its fundamental sculptural characteristics. The figure is thus a striking example of the expressive possibilities of a sculpture whose artistic intensity arises precisely from the renunciation of naturalistic details.
Literature
Piet Meyer: Art and Religion of the Lobi. Museum Rietberg, Zurich, 1981.
As comparative literature on figurative wood sculpture and religious beliefs in the wider West African savanna region.
Christopher D. Roy: Art and Life in Africa. University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1992. As a general reference on African sculpture traditions and their cultural functions.
The publications mentioned serve for comparative art historical classification. They do not establish the specific cultural attribution, dating, or original use of the sculpture in question.
Copyright and Scientific Documentation
Some of the information and photographs have been generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence and are based on published sources in ethnography, archaeology, and art history. Original texts and photographs may be protected by copyright. All rights held by the respective copyright holders are reserved.
Inv. No. MAZ30880
Informant: Ouro
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
Sculpture Koussasse – Anthropomorphic Ancestor or Guardian Figure
Origin: Savannah Region, Northern Togo
Cultural Attribution: Koussasse (Kusasi), attributed
Material: Wood, carved, with a natural, heavily weathered surface, incl stand.
Description
This anthropomorphic wooden sculpture from the savannah region of northern Togo is characterized by an exceptionally minimalist design, a strictly vertical body structure, and an impressive surface marked by natural aging processes. The upright figure is carved from a single piece of wood and has a large, nearly spherical head that rests directly on a narrow neck. The face is reduced to a few, sparsely carved features. Two small, sunken eyes mark the front of the head, while the nose and mouth appear barely or indistinctly defined. The smooth, slightly domed forehead transitions into a rounded skullcap, the surface of which is crisscrossed by deep longitudinal cracks. Below the head, an elongated, slightly conical torso develops, its outline reminiscent of a narrow, downward-curving cylinder. Arms, hands, and anatomical details of the upper body are not discernible. Rather, the body forms a closed, sculptural unit, which only dissolves in the lower section into two long, nearly parallel legs. These are separated by a deep gap and end without sculpted feet. The light brown to grayish-brown wooden surface shows pronounced signs of erosion, deep cracks, irregular breaks, and areas of darker discoloration. The vertical wood grain is particularly prominent on the torso and legs. The surface suggests prolonged exposure to climatic influences, although the photographic evidence alone does not allow for the determination of either the duration of these influences or the original display conditions. The current black display base is clearly not part of the original sculptural concept.
Cultural and Geographical Context
The population groups known as Koussasse or Kusasi are primarily located in northeastern Ghana and adjacent areas of Burkina Faso. The owner's stated origin in the savannah region of northern Togo thus points to a broader West African cultural sphere, whose historical relationships are characterized by migration, trade, and cultural exchange. A definitive attribution of the sculpture to the Kusasi cannot be confirmed based solely on its formal characteristics. Northern Togo is an ethnically and culturally diverse region where, among others, the Moba, Konkomba, Tchokossi, Bimoba, and other communities have developed distinct traditions of figurative wood carving. Particularly in northern Togo and the adjacent regions of Burkina Faso and Ghana, highly abstracted anthropomorphic wooden figures are known, whose meaning is often linked to ancestor worship, familial protection rituals, and the relationship between the living and the dead. In these religious systems, material representations can serve as memorials, objects of protection, or components of cultic installations. Their effectiveness, however, is not necessarily determined by a naturalistic rendering of the human body. Rather, the sculptural presence of a figure can arise from its ritual integration, its placement, and its ascribed relationship to supernatural entities. The present sculpture can be formally placed within this broader context, without this proving a specific original function.
Symbolism and Possible Ritual Function
The striking simplification of the human form opens up various possibilities for interpretation. The disproportionately large head could allude to a special significance of the head as a bearer of personality, memory, or spiritual identity. In numerous West African traditions, the head holds a prominent symbolic position, but it would be methodologically inadmissible to directly derive a specific religious message for the present figure from this. The missing arms and the largely closed body form lend the representation a decidedly static character. Instead of an acting or gesturing person, a resting, self-contained figure appears. This formal restraint could be compatible with its function as an ancestral representation or protective figure. An original placement within a family cult area, at a shrine, or at another ritually significant site is conceivable. Its use in connection with local earth or ancestor cults can also be considered within a broader regional context. However, ethnographic data that could substantiate such an interpretation for this specific object are lacking. The severe weathering could indicate prolonged exposure to the elements, as is documented for certain ritual wooden figures in the savanna region. Likewise, storage conditions or other subsequent influences could be responsible for its current state of preservation. The designation as an ancestral or protective figure should therefore be understood as a cautious functional hypothesis and not as a definitive classification.
Art Historical Analysis
The sculpture embodies a consistently abstract conception of the human figure, in which anatomical differentiation recedes in favor of a clear, elemental overall form. Its composition is based on three main sculptural elements: the spherical head, the elongated, slightly conical torso, and the two slender legs. These elements are connected without pronounced transitions and form a strictly vertical unity. The reduction of the face to two small depressions reinforces the impression of a deliberately restrained individualization. The head derives its expressiveness less from physiognomic details than from its size, its closed curve, and its position within the overall composition. The torso appears almost architectural, its form reminiscent of an upright wooden post. This affinity between human representation and the elemental post form can be observed in various sculptural traditions of the West African savannah regions. In particular, the wooden figures of the Moba people in northern Togo offer an important art-historical point of comparison with regard to their simplified conception of the body. The so-called tchitcheri of the Moba are often characterized by simplified human forms, elongated bodies, and a strong emphasis on the vertical axis. Such formal parallels are revealing for comparative analysis but do not justify an automatic reclassification of the present figure. Its cultural origin remains open, considering the traditional name Koussasse and the regional stylistic overlaps. The interplay between the original carving and the current, heavily eroded wooden surface is particularly noteworthy. Deep cracks, eroded areas, and irregular material losses lend the object an additional sculptural texture that partially obscures its original form. The resulting aesthetic effect should not be equated with a demonstrable artistic intention.
Art Historical Assessment
The particular quality of this sculpture lies in its radical formal concentration. With just a few sculptural interventions, a human figure of remarkable presence emerges. The large, almost closed head, the columnar body, and the slender legs form a composition whose effect derives primarily from proportion, rhythm, and materiality. The heavily weathered surface lends the figure an additional historical dimension, without allowing for a precise dating. In the context of figurative wood carving from the West African savannah belt, the object illustrates an aesthetic approach in which the human form is reduced to its fundamental sculptural characteristics. The figure is thus a striking example of the expressive possibilities of a sculpture whose artistic intensity arises precisely from the renunciation of naturalistic details.
Literature
Piet Meyer: Art and Religion of the Lobi. Museum Rietberg, Zurich, 1981.
As comparative literature on figurative wood sculpture and religious beliefs in the wider West African savanna region.
Christopher D. Roy: Art and Life in Africa. University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1992. As a general reference on African sculpture traditions and their cultural functions.
The publications mentioned serve for comparative art historical classification. They do not establish the specific cultural attribution, dating, or original use of the sculpture in question.
Copyright and Scientific Documentation
Some of the information and photographs have been generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence and are based on published sources in ethnography, archaeology, and art history. Original texts and photographs may be protected by copyright. All rights held by the respective copyright holders are reserved.
Inv. No. MAZ30880
Informant: Ouro
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
Koussasse
Country of Origin
Togo
Material
Wood
Sold with stand
Yes
Condition
Fair condition
Title of artwork
A wooden sculpture
Height
39 cm
Weight
760 g
Authenticity
Original/official
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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