Product Description
Old-carved Ngil Fang Mask – Gabon
This beautiful old carving originates from the Fang people of Gabon. Among the Fang, these type of masks identify to the Ngil Society and are known for their elegant abstractions of the human face. They were meant to protect. They are often of great aesthetic quality, which suggests that they are the culmination of a long sculptural tradition.
Made of 100% wood.
Model is W 69 – H 20 and weight 1.4 kg.
Description
This beautiful old carving originates from the Fang people of Gabon. Among the Fang, these type of masks identify to the Ngil Society and are known for their elegant abstractions of the human face. They were meant to protect. They are often of great aesthetic quality, which suggests that they are the culmination of a long sculptural tradition. Ngil African Masks have been described as having a ‘heart-shaped face’ due to the facial features emphasizing refined curves of the orbital ridges above the eyes and the prominent line of the tapered nose that ended above the open mouth completing the abstraction of the face.
Symbolic representations of ancestors, these comparatively rare heads hold a special place in the corpus of Fang statuary. A sculptural interpretation of the ancestor pared down solely to the head, they became a source of fascination as early as the 1910s and 1920s for some of the most prominent pioneers of African art. The Fang are best known for their wooden reliquary figures which are abstract anthropomorphic carvings.
The ensemble of Fang peoples practices a cult devoted to ancestor lineages, the bieri, whose aim is to both protect themselves from the deceased and to recruit their aid in matters of daily life. This familial cult does not monopolize the Fang’s religious universe, for it coexists with other beliefs and rituals of a more collective character. It is the bieri, or ancestor sculpture, which has most obviously given rise to the making of remarkable wooden sculpture. The statuary of the Fang can be classified into three main groups: heads on long necks, half-figures, and full figures, standing or seated. Carved with great simplicity, at the same time they exhibit a high degree of sophistication in the coordination of bulbous forms. The neck is often a massive cylindrical form. The arms have various positions: hands clasped in front of the body (sometimes holding an object); held in front of the chest or attached to it; hands resting on the knees in the seated figures. The navel is often exaggerated into a cylindrical form. Legs are short, stunted. Usually, there is a domed, wide forehead and the eyebrows often form arcs with the nose. The eyes are often made of metal roundlets. The bieri would be consulted when the village was to change location, when a new crop was planted, during a palaver, or before going hunting, fishing, or to war. But once separated from the reliquary chest, the sculpted object would lose its sacred value and could be destroyed.
The people that are called “Fang” in the geographic or ethnographic literature number 800,000 and constitute a vast mosaic of village communities, established in a large zone of Atlantic equatorial Africa comprising Cameroon, continental Equatorial Guinea and nearly the whole north of Gabon, on the right bank of the Ogowe River.
Historically the Fang were itinerant, and it is relatively recently that they have settled into this broad area. The migratory existence of the Fang prohibited the creation of ancestral shrines at gravesites. Instead, the remains of the important dead, in the form of the skull and other bones, were carried from place to place in a cylindrical bark box.
Additional information
| Weight | 1.4 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 20 × 69 cm |
| Color | |
| Material |
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