At our new exhibition “Echoes” in Antwerp, two stunning antique Dan masks from Ivory Coast are juxtaposed with a captivating contemporary work by South-African artist Kendell Geers (b. 1968) – as you can see above. As I’m very excited about this conversation I thought I share some of its backstory with you.
Inspired by a Dan mask, Geers has overmodelled a 3D model with clay before having it cast in bronze. Its title ‘Flesh of the Spirit’ is a play on the title of Robert Farris Thompson’s famed book “Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy” from 1983. This ongoing series of sculptures and masks was exhibited most recently at Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery in Paris in 2022 – you can download the catalog of that show here.
Kendell Geers with ‘Flesh of the Spirit 8231’ and ‘Mutus Liber (Fetish) 5202’, 2021 Courtesy of Kendell Geers & Carpenters Workshop Gallery.
The backstory of the origin of these series is deeply personal for Geers, who has been living in Brussels for two decades, inhabiting an “inter-zone” as a white South African. “My family has been living in Africa for 300 years,” says Geers, who grew up during apartheid. “As I’m white, some people don’t consider me to be African but I’m certainly not European. My work as an artist and curator is an excavation of that complex identity.” Aiming to shift perception about the African masking tradition from a “primitive art history into something sophisticated and complicated”, Geers began making works based on masks in 2016. Geers uses masks as a modern interrogation of identity, freedom, protection, and display. The artist 3D scans African masks and works directly into them with his hands, shifting their identities away from clearly defined roles and using them as territories of conflicting expression. The mouth of these masks becomes a key battleground in the artist’s visual dissection of speech and power. He questions who has the right to speech, while acknowledging the right to speak is not the same as the ability. In his masks (like the one on view at “Echoes”) the mouth is often obscured, denying the persona of the mask the power of speech. If you want to learn more, you can see the artist introduce the series here.
"What makes African art special is that when you look at an African work of art, it looks back at you."
- Kendell Geers
Next to Geers’ beautiful contemporary mask, an important antique Dan mask from Ivory Coast of the type that inspired it is on view. This beautiful face mask was collected by Jean Houzeau de Lehaie (1867-1959), a Belgian botanist who made three trips to Africa, the first to Maroc, the second in 1933 in the company of Frans Olbrechts, and the third from March to May 1934, during which he traveled from Guinea to Senegal and Ivory Coast. During this last trip he collected plants and insects for the Royal Museum of Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren. Houzeau de Lehaie also collected several Dan masks during this 1934 trip, all of which he illustrated with beautiful drawings in his inventories (donated to the RMCA in 1969).
Particular about the mask is its patina; created by its sculptor spitting chewed kola-nuts on the wood. During Ghent University’s famed “Ivory Coast Expedition”, Pieter-Jan Vandenhoute photographed the Dan sculptor Guwe in Flanpleu while applying this typical patina. The three scarification lines on the edge of both cheeks of the mask indicate its northern origin in the Dan region, confirmed by the note it was acquired in Man from the art dealer Zacharia Mustapha Sao on 25 April 1934 – one of the very few times an African dealer is mentioned as a provenance for a Dan mask!
Photo by Pieter-Jan Vandenhoute in April 1939, published in: Petridis (Constantine), "Frans M. Olbrechts 1899-1958. In Search of Art in Africa", Antwerp Ethnographic Museum, 2001, fig. 85.
The second Dan mask on view at “Echoes” is a great example of the diversity in styles within the region. In contrast to the flattened back of the northern Dan mask, its curve points to a Liberian origin, just as its tube eyes – which Pieter-Jan Vandenhoute considered a typical trait of the Kulimé sub-group who lived in the border region of the Dan and the Wè peoples.
This mask was once in the famed collection of Odette and René Delenne. The Delennes started collecting African art after visiting the Congolese pavilion at the Brussels world’s fair in 1958. Odette shared her love of collecting with René and opened an art gallery named Galerie Antilope in Brussels in 1962, yet kept most of the best works she acquired for herself. Their descents sold most of their collection to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2011 – as published by Constatine Petridis in "Fragments of the Invisible: The René and Odette Delenne Collection of Congo Sculpture" (Milan, 2013), while others were auctioned off at Sotheby’s Paris in 2015. They acquired the Dan mask during one of their many holidays in the south of France from the German artist Paul Elsas – who’s life story you can read here.
Left: sold at Enchères Rive Gauche, Paris, "La Collection Pierre et Claude Vérité", 17-18 June 2006, lot 73. Middle mask: published in: Expo cat.: "Guere-Wobe-Bete", Paris: Galerie Hélène Kamer, 1978: #1. Right mask published in: Hourdé (Daniel), "Dan", Paris: Gallery Ratton-Hourdé, June 2007:49.
Besides its tube eyes, the Delenne masks sets itself apart within the corpus thanks to the delicate scarfication patterns on its forehead. While the central vertical ridge is common among the southern Dan, the incised patterns are a rare feature, which it shares with only a few other masks – three of them illustrated above. Small holes on the eye tubes indicate these were once covered with metal strips – their shiny nature making it impossible to look into the mask’s eyes when they reflected the tropical sun during a performance. The exceptional craftsmanship of the mask’s creator is displayed in the beautiful rendering of the nose and nostrils. But it is especially the mouth, with its extravagant upper lip which imbues this mask with presence.