The Teke people have inhabited the area that divides the capitals of Congo – Kinshasa and Congo –Brazzaville, and occupy both of these countries, with a somewhat larger population in the latter. Due to their geographic location inland from the coast of the Atlantic, the Teke were far less affected by colonial intrusion into their cultural heartland than may of their neighbors and maintained a relative level of autonomy until the colonial period.

Teke Art is best known for its figural sculptures most often carved with faces bearing fine incised linear patterns as the Teke themselves wore up until the first third of the twentieth century. These figures in use often are heavily encased in a mass from neck to knees containing empowering materials which were believed to protect the owner of the figure. Some of these images were ancestral in nature while others were the abodes of nature spirits.

The masks of the northern Teke were used in initiatory contexts and are astonishingly abstracted as flat discs with raised patterns; the complex imagery relating to Teke cosmological thought and thought to depict our world and the underworld of the ancestors.

This exhibition draws together some of the finest extant examples of Teke masks and figural sculpture from important collections, including an example formerly owned by Pablo Picasso, and illustrates the genius of Teke carvings, illustrating their power, art and cosmology.