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All auctions / Ethnographic / Two Guerrero Mezcala Stone Axe God Figures
Pre-Columbian, Mexico, Guerrero, Mezcala. A pair of anthropomorphic figures carved from dense volcanic stone in the pared-down idiom for which the Mezcala culture of Guerrero is celebrated. Each takes the "axe-god" form, a votive object worked from a polished celt so that the tool itself becomes a standing body. Broad grooves and shallow channels articulate a domed head, a suggested neck, and a columnar torso terminating in cursory legs, the sculptor coaxing a human presence from the fewest possible cuts. The surfaces retain a soft, waxy sheen from handling and burial. Such figures were not weapons but ritual effigies, likely deposited as offerings or interred with the dead, their abstraction lending them an enduring, almost modernist economy of line that captivated twentieth-century collectors. The Mezcala style takes its name from the Rio Balsas (Mezcala) drainage of central Guerrero. Lacking a securely excavated chronology, these lapidary works are broadly dated to the Middle-to-Late Preclassic, though the tradition persisted for centuries; Mezcala objects were prized as heirlooms even by the later Aztec, who buried them as offerings in the Templo Mayor at Tenochtitlan. The reductive geometry, achieved by abrading hard stone with cord, sand, and simpler stones rather than metal tools, so anticipates the vocabulary of modern abstraction that figures like these were avidly sought by artists and collectors including Diego Rivera. Item # 203133
Estimate:$300
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorEthnographic
Estimate:
$300
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