For the third consecutive year, Entwistle participated in the prestigious London art fair 'Frieze Masters'...
For the third consecutive year, Entwistle participated in this prestigious and much anticipated fair, bringing together a selection of some of the greatest works of art from the ethnic cultures of Africa, Oceania and the Americas
Among the highlights that Entwistle presented at Frieze Masters was a rare and refined female figure, or mbulenga, from the Bakwa Ndolo sub-group of the Bena Luluwa peoples of the Kasai River district in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
The figure is arguably the finest privately owned example of a style described by William Fagg as ‘the most artistically sophisticated and perhaps also the oldest in the tribe’. Only one or two pieces of this type exist outside the Musée Royale du Congo Belge, Tervuren, and surviving pieces are extremely rare
The figure has a remarkable provenance - collected in the field by Dr. T. Fourche, before 1940, it was then accessioned by the Musée Royale du Congo Belge, Tervuren, Belgium and then in the collections of Emile Deletaille, [circa 1975, by exchange] and Marc Ginzberg, New York before being acquired from Entwistle by an American private collection
Among the celebrated exhibitions the figure has appeared in are African Sculpture: The Shape of Surprise, held at Long Island University (C.W. Post College) in Greenvale, New York, in 1980 and Perspectives: Angles on African Art, held at the Center for African Art in New York in 1987
Among the many publications in which the figure has appeared are
Susan Mullin Vogel, African Sculpture: The Shape of Surprise, Long Island, 1980, cat. 184; Susan Mullin Vogel et al, Perspectives: Angles on African Art, New York, 1987, pp. 168-9 and Frank Willett, African Art: An Introduction, New York, 1971, p. 190 [labelled British Museum]
Bena Luluwa Figure