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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Ethnographic / Veracruz Sandstone Head with Crest and Open Mouth
Pre-Columbian, Mexico, Veracruz. A carved sandstone head reduced to its essentials: a heavy shelf of brow overhanging deeply sunken eyes, a slender nasal bridge widening to a broad nose with flared nostrils, and a small open mouth caught mid-breath, as though blowing, howling, or singing. The crown rises into a pronounced crest, perhaps a coiffure or headdress rendered as pure volume. The tapering neck and lower face carry the tool marks of direct percussion and abrasion, with no trace of applied pigment. The stone reads warm red to pink, mottled with gray and capped by brown earthen deposits. Sculptural heads of this reductive type are associated with the Gulf Coast of Mexico, where they likely served votive or commemorative roles, though the precise function of an unprovenanced example of this kind remains open. The open, rounded mouth is a persistent motif in Gulf Coast sculpture, where breath, song, and wind carried theological weight. In Mesoamerican thought, exhaled breath was a visible sign of animate life, and the wind deity Ehecatl, whose cult had deep Gulf Coast roots, was conventionally shown with a protruding mouth for blowing the roads clear before the rains. Whether this head represents a deity, a singer, or simply a face arrested in the act of speech cannot be settled from the carving alone, but the deliberate parting of the lips is a choice the sculptor made, not an accident of erosion. Item # 204654
Estimate:$400
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorEthnographic
Estimate:
$400
OCT 8 | 3:00 PM
OCT 8 | 3:00 PM
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African Ancestral Figure, Hemba. Zaire. Inscribed monogram H with
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