A wooden sculpture - Fon - 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 € 450 - € 550
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A wooden sculpture from the Aného region in Togo, attributed to the Fon people, with provenance to Aného region; material wood; height 47 cm, depth 83 cm; weight 13.6 kg; condition Fair; authenticity Original/official.
AI-assisted summary
Description from the seller
Fon/Ewe fetish sculpture, votive or altar canoe made of wood
Origin: Aného region, Togo.
Material: brown-black to gray wood, matte patina, numerous longitudinal cracks, erosion, traces of carving, and several whitish patches.
Description
The sculpture is centered around a hull that appears to be carved from a single piece of wood, thick and deeply hollowed out, with a silhouette resembling that of a boat with raised ends. The wood, which ranges from brown-black to gray, has a matte patina, numerous longitudinal cracks, signs of erosion, traces of carving, and several whitish patches. These patches could be kaolin, ash, sacrificial materials, or more recent alterations; however, their composition cannot be determined from the photograph alone. Two anthropomorphic busts are attached to the ends of the hull. Both face outward, as if watching over the bow and stern of the dugout canoe. Their forms are more elaborately rendered than those of the central figures: oval heads, ears in relief, elongated eyes, straight noses, open or protruding mouths, roughly indicated hairstyles, and strongly developed chests. Their opposing positions create a two-way surveillance system. Between these busts stand approximately eight vertical forms of varying sizes. Some appear to be extremely simplified figures, reduced to a cylindrical torso topped by a conical or wrapped head; others have a distinctly phallic shape. The tallest one dominates the composition near one end. This tightly packed arrangement gives the impression of a group of passengers, spirits, or deities on board rather than that of a simple household vessel.
Historical-Artistic and Material Analysis
The hull provides a stable horizontal mass, while the figures introduce a deliberately irregular vertical rhythm. The two terminal busts frame the scene like guardians, ancestors, or tutelary figures. The central figures form an assembly hierarchically arranged by size. The work does not seek naturalism: it emphasizes repetition, silhouette, accumulation, and evocative power. The figures appear to have been carved separately and then inserted into the shell using tenons. A comprehensive material analysis should identify the wood species through microscopic examination, verify the joints via X-ray, and analyze the white or organic deposits. The dark patina, cracks, and residues are insufficient to establish the object's date. In Vodun art, the visible form often results as much from the initial carving as from subsequent manipulations, libations, offerings, and substances intended to activate or maintain the object. This work likely belongs to the todjivu family, a Fongbe term used to refer to ritual canoes depicting humans, deities, animals, food, and beings from the invisible world. The Château Vodou describes them as "materialized prayers" and houses examples from Togo and Benin associated, depending on the case, with Dan, Sakpata, Toxosu, the twins, or the memory of enslaved people. A historical parallel is provided by a 19th-century Fon altar sculpture housed at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: it depicts a large boat populated by nine figures and has been cautiously interpreted as a fishing or war fetish dedicated to Legba. This comparison confirms the existence of a distinct genre of ritual boat-shaped sculptures, though it does not allow for the automatic identification of the deity represented in this piece.
Ritual Function
The canoe here is less a miniature means of transportation than a condensed ritual space. In coastal Vodun shrines, it may represent the passage between the land, the lagoon, the sea, the human world, the ancestors, and invisible powers. Research conducted in an Ewe fishing community in southern Togo shows that the shrine constitutes a landscape that is simultaneously religious, ecological, economic, and social, in which water, fishing, historical memory, and spirits are closely intertwined. The phallic elements may refer to fertility, generative power, or Legba, a deity associated with thresholds, communication, and sexual potency; however, this interpretation remains hypothetical. They may also represent highly stylized figures, spirits, or objects intended to bear ritual offerings. The two busts placed at the ends may depict protectors, ancestors, a founding couple, or two complementary powers. The most likely function is that of a votive offering placed in a shrine to ask for protection, prosperity, fertility, a successful catch, safe travel on the water, or the appeasement of a spiritual power. The canoe may also have served a commemorative function: certain todjivu evoke those who drowned, children associated with Toxosu, or even the memory of the Atlantic slave trade. Nevertheless, without a local name, testimony from a priest, preserved ritual contents, or historical collection records, none of these interpretations should be considered definitive.
Selected Bibliography
Blier, Suzanne Preston. *African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Rush, Dana. *Vodun in Coastal Benin: Unfinished, Open-Ended, Global*. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013.
Montgomery, Eric J., and Christian N. Vannier. An Ethnography of a Vodu Shrine in Southern Togo: Of Spirit, Slave, and Sea. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2017.
Agbanon II, Nicoué Lodjou Gayibor, Yves Marguerat, and Roberto Pazzi. History of Petit-Popo and the Guin Kingdom. Paris-Lomé, Karthala-Haho, 1991.
Anézo, Jean-Yves. "The Piroges – Todjivu." Château Vodou, Strasbourg, museum dossier, 2024.
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. MAZ32801
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
Fon/Ewe fetish sculpture, votive or altar canoe made of wood
Origin: Aného region, Togo.
Material: brown-black to gray wood, matte patina, numerous longitudinal cracks, erosion, traces of carving, and several whitish patches.
Description
The sculpture is centered around a hull that appears to be carved from a single piece of wood, thick and deeply hollowed out, with a silhouette resembling that of a boat with raised ends. The wood, which ranges from brown-black to gray, has a matte patina, numerous longitudinal cracks, signs of erosion, traces of carving, and several whitish patches. These patches could be kaolin, ash, sacrificial materials, or more recent alterations; however, their composition cannot be determined from the photograph alone. Two anthropomorphic busts are attached to the ends of the hull. Both face outward, as if watching over the bow and stern of the dugout canoe. Their forms are more elaborately rendered than those of the central figures: oval heads, ears in relief, elongated eyes, straight noses, open or protruding mouths, roughly indicated hairstyles, and strongly developed chests. Their opposing positions create a two-way surveillance system. Between these busts stand approximately eight vertical forms of varying sizes. Some appear to be extremely simplified figures, reduced to a cylindrical torso topped by a conical or wrapped head; others have a distinctly phallic shape. The tallest one dominates the composition near one end. This tightly packed arrangement gives the impression of a group of passengers, spirits, or deities on board rather than that of a simple household vessel.
Historical-Artistic and Material Analysis
The hull provides a stable horizontal mass, while the figures introduce a deliberately irregular vertical rhythm. The two terminal busts frame the scene like guardians, ancestors, or tutelary figures. The central figures form an assembly hierarchically arranged by size. The work does not seek naturalism: it emphasizes repetition, silhouette, accumulation, and evocative power. The figures appear to have been carved separately and then inserted into the shell using tenons. A comprehensive material analysis should identify the wood species through microscopic examination, verify the joints via X-ray, and analyze the white or organic deposits. The dark patina, cracks, and residues are insufficient to establish the object's date. In Vodun art, the visible form often results as much from the initial carving as from subsequent manipulations, libations, offerings, and substances intended to activate or maintain the object. This work likely belongs to the todjivu family, a Fongbe term used to refer to ritual canoes depicting humans, deities, animals, food, and beings from the invisible world. The Château Vodou describes them as "materialized prayers" and houses examples from Togo and Benin associated, depending on the case, with Dan, Sakpata, Toxosu, the twins, or the memory of enslaved people. A historical parallel is provided by a 19th-century Fon altar sculpture housed at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: it depicts a large boat populated by nine figures and has been cautiously interpreted as a fishing or war fetish dedicated to Legba. This comparison confirms the existence of a distinct genre of ritual boat-shaped sculptures, though it does not allow for the automatic identification of the deity represented in this piece.
Ritual Function
The canoe here is less a miniature means of transportation than a condensed ritual space. In coastal Vodun shrines, it may represent the passage between the land, the lagoon, the sea, the human world, the ancestors, and invisible powers. Research conducted in an Ewe fishing community in southern Togo shows that the shrine constitutes a landscape that is simultaneously religious, ecological, economic, and social, in which water, fishing, historical memory, and spirits are closely intertwined. The phallic elements may refer to fertility, generative power, or Legba, a deity associated with thresholds, communication, and sexual potency; however, this interpretation remains hypothetical. They may also represent highly stylized figures, spirits, or objects intended to bear ritual offerings. The two busts placed at the ends may depict protectors, ancestors, a founding couple, or two complementary powers. The most likely function is that of a votive offering placed in a shrine to ask for protection, prosperity, fertility, a successful catch, safe travel on the water, or the appeasement of a spiritual power. The canoe may also have served a commemorative function: certain todjivu evoke those who drowned, children associated with Toxosu, or even the memory of the Atlantic slave trade. Nevertheless, without a local name, testimony from a priest, preserved ritual contents, or historical collection records, none of these interpretations should be considered definitive.
Selected Bibliography
Blier, Suzanne Preston. *African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Rush, Dana. *Vodun in Coastal Benin: Unfinished, Open-Ended, Global*. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013.
Montgomery, Eric J., and Christian N. Vannier. An Ethnography of a Vodu Shrine in Southern Togo: Of Spirit, Slave, and Sea. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2017.
Agbanon II, Nicoué Lodjou Gayibor, Yves Marguerat, and Roberto Pazzi. History of Petit-Popo and the Guin Kingdom. Paris-Lomé, Karthala-Haho, 1991.
Anézo, Jean-Yves. "The Piroges – Todjivu." Château Vodou, Strasbourg, museum dossier, 2024.
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. MAZ32801
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
Fon
Country of Origin
Togo
Material
Wood
Sold with stand
No
Condition
Fair condition
Title of artwork
A wooden sculpture
Height
47 cm
Depth
83 cm
Weight
13.6 kg
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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