Oceanic Art - Image Enlargement           Back to Figures

This figure is a very rare ancestral carving from the remote Gnau culture that lives that lives in the remote southern slopes of the Torricelli Mountain range in Papua New Guinea's West Sepik Province. Less than 10 figure carvings, of any style, are known to exist from this culture. I have included an image of a very similar post-like figure without arms photographed by Gilbert Lewis in Rauit Village in the late 1960s. His book "Knowledge of Illness in a Sepik Society: A Study of the Gnau, New Guinea" is the only ethnographic account of this intriguing culture. In the caption that accompanies Lewis' image, he describes how the figure is anointed with the blood of a freshly hunted and killed cassowary bird. The piece shows a good aged patina and traces of red pigments. The figure is 60" in height, comes mounted on a custom display stand. sold