Classic Oduduwa Mask

Nobel Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka has collected Nigerian antiquities for over six decades. This mask is part of the collection, and here he explains it's provenance:

"So we come to Ife. The relation between Ife, the Yoruba and Benin, of course, is always stressed historically, culturally, but nowhere is it more evident than in the art of bronze sculpture.

And this is presumably an Oduduwa head, could just be, but it's considered a very familiar class Ife bronze. The instantiations distinguish it very often, which is of course, a result of the solid cast. I just call it a classical Ife bronze head.

When you see things like this, you know that you cannot discard this simply because of modernistic quirks. The artist represents the storks mimics, repeats, replicates. They're not anthropological pieces.

When it's a mythological piece, it makes it more interesting, but principally from me, these are objects for contemplation, of appreciation, of evocation and that's the way I like to look at the pieces which I collect.

Viewers impose also their interpretations on pieces which are very often very subjective, which are related to the viewers experiences elsewhere, often unrelated once its been looked at and so I like people to look at these works, even when they’re called traditional works to see them as artistic pieces, which is a recognition that is come to them finally even by the European World, which treated African art as anthropology, something I have always very strongly resented."