Sunday, July 04, 2010

Kingdom of Ife

I went along to the British Museum's Kingdom of Ife exhibition yesterday with the vague idea that sculptures from West Africa may throw some light on the African mask that I bought from our auction site back in 2004.

All the exhibits were brass, copper, stone or terracotta with no stylistic kinship with the mask at all as far as I could tell, but they were extraordinary works and well worth a visit. I was also surprised that they generally seemed to be portraits from life rather than the stylised images I was expecting.

(PS A club contest judo gold medal for the bomber yesterday morning. Cool that it is just a footnote these days.)

No comments: