A wooden sculpture - Ewe - 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 depicting an Ewe anthropomorphic figure from the Tsévié region, Togo, authenticated as original/official, 23 cm high, 250 g, made of wood with textile elements, and sold without a stand.
AI-assisted summary
Description from the seller
Anthropomorphic figure with textile attachments, Ewe
Origin: Tsévié region, Togo
Material: wood, textile, cords, pigments, and unidentified materials; ritual object associated with Vodun practices and protection; specific function not documented.
Description
This attributed Ewe anthropomorphic figure features a vertical wooden structure almost entirely concealed beneath a dense accumulation of small textile pouches knotted or tied around the body. Only the head and the base remain clearly visible. The carefully carved head displays a relatively naturalistic face: a rounded forehead, pronounced brow ridges, slightly protruding almond-shaped eyes, a straight nose, closed lips, and prominent ears. The hairstyle consists of thick, parallel, longitudinal strands that cascade down toward the nape of the neck. Small appendages appear near the ears, which may suggest ornaments or added elements. Very visible traces of blue pigment remain on the forehead, around the eyes, on the cheeks, and near the mouth; however, they cannot be chemically identified without laboratory analysis. The body is wrapped in several dozen small bundles of fabric—square, rectangular, or oval in shape—arranged in overlapping layers. Some still exhibit yellow, blue, or grayish hues; others are heavily coated with a beige-gray powdery substance. Threads, cords, and ties remain visible between the pouches. Their contents cannot be determined from photographs: they could consist of plant, mineral, or animal materials, or miniature objects, but only an X-ray or non-invasive analysis would allow this to be verified. The circular base, which is partially visible, bears reddish marks. The entire piece has a dusty, irregular, and heavily encrusted surface, indicating a gradual construction process rather than a sculpture conceived as a bare, definitive form.
Historical-artistic analysis and scientifically grounded description
This object likely belongs to the broad family of Vodun religious arts from southern Togo, in which a carved figure may constitute only the core of a much more complex material assemblage. Claude Rivière describes a religious universe among the Ewe of Togo that combines vodu, trõ, ancestors, Afa divination, sacrifices, healing, protection, and objects imbued with substances intended to establish a relationship between individuals and invisible powers. Tsévié is, in fact, among the localities mentioned in his ethnographic study. Sculpture must therefore be considered not merely as a "statue," but as a composite and transformable object. Suzanne Preston Blier has shown that, in the vodun arts of Togo and Benin, wood, textiles, ropes, bones, plants, and other materials can be assembled to produce objects whose power lies as much in their successive additions and transformations as in the initial sculpted form. She emphasizes, in particular, the mechanisms of "activation," the addition of materials, and binding characteristic of certain bocio-type sculptures. The object presented here can be linked to this logic, though it is not possible to definitively classify it as a bocio or attribute it to a specific vodun. The exceptional accumulation of pouches almost entirely transforms the human silhouette: the body becomes an architecture of superimposed layers. This aesthetic of addition is significant. It suggests that the efficacy attributed to the object could have been built up over time through the addition of new elements corresponding to requests, prescriptions, or ritual operations.
Ritual Function
In the religious practices documented in southern Togo, objects commonly referred to as "fetishes" are not simply images of deities. Albert de Surgy describes them as material devices crafted, consecrated, and maintained to mediate the relationship between humans and spiritual powers. Their composition may include plants, powders, fabrics, sacrificial substances, ritual incantations, libations, and other components selected according to the intended purpose. His study directly references Tsévié and numerous methods for preparing and activating ritual objects. The pouches visible in this illustration could thus be interpreted as ritual charges or containers, each potentially holding a specific substance, prescription, or intention. Possible functions within this type of tradition include personal or family protection, healing, defense against malevolent influences, strengthening an individual or a sanctuary, fulfilling a request, or controlling certain forces. Vodun sculptures documented in Togo and Benin have indeed been used for protection, healing, and, in some cases, actions directed against adversaries. The Smithsonian also holds photographic records attesting to the use of vodun statues receiving sacrificial liquids in the coastal region of Togo.
Selected Bibliography
Rivière, Claude. Religious Anthropology of the Evé of Togo. Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1981.
de Surgy, Albert. Nature and Function of Fetishes in Black Africa: The Case of Southern Togo. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994.
de Surgy, Albert. The Way of the Fetishes: An Essay on the Theoretical Foundations and Mystical Perspective of Fetishists' Practices. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1995.
Blier, Suzanne Preston. African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art (ed.). Vodun: African Voodoo. Munich: Hirmer, 2011.
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. MAZ33234
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
Anthropomorphic figure with textile attachments, Ewe
Origin: Tsévié region, Togo
Material: wood, textile, cords, pigments, and unidentified materials; ritual object associated with Vodun practices and protection; specific function not documented.
Description
This attributed Ewe anthropomorphic figure features a vertical wooden structure almost entirely concealed beneath a dense accumulation of small textile pouches knotted or tied around the body. Only the head and the base remain clearly visible. The carefully carved head displays a relatively naturalistic face: a rounded forehead, pronounced brow ridges, slightly protruding almond-shaped eyes, a straight nose, closed lips, and prominent ears. The hairstyle consists of thick, parallel, longitudinal strands that cascade down toward the nape of the neck. Small appendages appear near the ears, which may suggest ornaments or added elements. Very visible traces of blue pigment remain on the forehead, around the eyes, on the cheeks, and near the mouth; however, they cannot be chemically identified without laboratory analysis. The body is wrapped in several dozen small bundles of fabric—square, rectangular, or oval in shape—arranged in overlapping layers. Some still exhibit yellow, blue, or grayish hues; others are heavily coated with a beige-gray powdery substance. Threads, cords, and ties remain visible between the pouches. Their contents cannot be determined from photographs: they could consist of plant, mineral, or animal materials, or miniature objects, but only an X-ray or non-invasive analysis would allow this to be verified. The circular base, which is partially visible, bears reddish marks. The entire piece has a dusty, irregular, and heavily encrusted surface, indicating a gradual construction process rather than a sculpture conceived as a bare, definitive form.
Historical-artistic analysis and scientifically grounded description
This object likely belongs to the broad family of Vodun religious arts from southern Togo, in which a carved figure may constitute only the core of a much more complex material assemblage. Claude Rivière describes a religious universe among the Ewe of Togo that combines vodu, trõ, ancestors, Afa divination, sacrifices, healing, protection, and objects imbued with substances intended to establish a relationship between individuals and invisible powers. Tsévié is, in fact, among the localities mentioned in his ethnographic study. Sculpture must therefore be considered not merely as a "statue," but as a composite and transformable object. Suzanne Preston Blier has shown that, in the vodun arts of Togo and Benin, wood, textiles, ropes, bones, plants, and other materials can be assembled to produce objects whose power lies as much in their successive additions and transformations as in the initial sculpted form. She emphasizes, in particular, the mechanisms of "activation," the addition of materials, and binding characteristic of certain bocio-type sculptures. The object presented here can be linked to this logic, though it is not possible to definitively classify it as a bocio or attribute it to a specific vodun. The exceptional accumulation of pouches almost entirely transforms the human silhouette: the body becomes an architecture of superimposed layers. This aesthetic of addition is significant. It suggests that the efficacy attributed to the object could have been built up over time through the addition of new elements corresponding to requests, prescriptions, or ritual operations.
Ritual Function
In the religious practices documented in southern Togo, objects commonly referred to as "fetishes" are not simply images of deities. Albert de Surgy describes them as material devices crafted, consecrated, and maintained to mediate the relationship between humans and spiritual powers. Their composition may include plants, powders, fabrics, sacrificial substances, ritual incantations, libations, and other components selected according to the intended purpose. His study directly references Tsévié and numerous methods for preparing and activating ritual objects. The pouches visible in this illustration could thus be interpreted as ritual charges or containers, each potentially holding a specific substance, prescription, or intention. Possible functions within this type of tradition include personal or family protection, healing, defense against malevolent influences, strengthening an individual or a sanctuary, fulfilling a request, or controlling certain forces. Vodun sculptures documented in Togo and Benin have indeed been used for protection, healing, and, in some cases, actions directed against adversaries. The Smithsonian also holds photographic records attesting to the use of vodun statues receiving sacrificial liquids in the coastal region of Togo.
Selected Bibliography
Rivière, Claude. Religious Anthropology of the Evé of Togo. Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1981.
de Surgy, Albert. Nature and Function of Fetishes in Black Africa: The Case of Southern Togo. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994.
de Surgy, Albert. The Way of the Fetishes: An Essay on the Theoretical Foundations and Mystical Perspective of Fetishists' Practices. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1995.
Blier, Suzanne Preston. African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art (ed.). Vodun: African Voodoo. Munich: Hirmer, 2011.
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. MAZ33234
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
Ewe
Country of Origin
Togo
Material
Wood
Sold with stand
No
Condition
Fair condition
Title of artwork
A wooden sculpture
Height
23 cm
Weight
250 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
AGB
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