Figure of a female ancestor Tilkotina. Lobi culture, Burkina Faso, 19th century or earlier.

Figure of a female ancestor Tilkotina. Lobi culture, Burkina Faso, 19th century or earlier.
Wood.
Provenance : - Sotheby's, Paris, June 8, 2007, No. 45.
Measurements: 91 cm high.

Ritual altar sculpture of the Lobi people, carved in wood in round bulk. It represents an ancestor.

The Lobi live in the southwest of Burkina Faso and in the northeast of Ivory Coast. They are mainly farmers, and their arts include sculpture, which is very popular today. This is partly because Lobi carvings display the kind of formal strength that collectors of African art admire, theirs being a synthetic language of great compositional rigor. Each Lobi man considers himself a potential artist, so that over time a great diversity of styles has emerged, from hard, stylized, near-abstract languages to naturalistic and polished ones. In the past, the Lobi were well known as a people who resisted any form of political authority imposed from outside their communities.