Anonymous Pende artist
Wood
4 x 20 7/8 in
While the Pende sculpted a myriad of mask types in uncountable quantities, representations of their supreme god are extremely rare. This god created everything, but isn’t really worshipped. To the Pende, he is the ultimate chief, yet a faraway chief. The ancestors are considered to remain much closer, influential and implicated in all acts of life. Depicted as a head with arms as ears, this surrealistic sculpture once graced a wall seen the flat backside of the head sculpted with the typical Pende physiognomy with a bulging forehead, slit eyes, scarifications on the cheeks and fleshy lips. The hands are carved wide open in an act of giving and receiving. The Pende specialist Willy Peters (active as an artist under the name of LMG Ploem) observed two similar examples in the Gungu National Museum in D.R. Congo before it burned down in 2021. Such objects were said to be used as some kind of house mask, which were usually a smaller version of the larger mbuya masks.
Provenance
Bren Heymans, Antwerp, Belgium, 2021
Duende Art Projects, Antwerp, Belgium