A Guro mask

Estimated price  500 - 600 €

A Guro mask, Ivory Coast, Gohitafla region. Incl. stand.

The Guro people of central Côte d’Ivoire, particularly in and around the Gohitafla region, are renowned for their visually refined and spiritually potent masks used in performance and ritual. These masks serve a variety of functions—from entertainment to spiritual mediation—and are essential components of Guro ceremonial life. Gohitafla, a culturally rich area, is home to diverse masking traditions that reflect the deep interweaving of art, community, and cosmology.
Guro masks from this region are often associated with the Zaouli, Zamble, Gu, and Dje masks, each representing specific mythical beings or spirits (zamblé being a hybrid zoomorphic figure, Gu representing feminine beauty, Zaouli being a more recent but highly popular dance mask). These masks are carved from wood and often feature delicately modeled facial features, including slender noses, almond-shaped eyes, and refined mouths, combined with elaborate headdresses or zoomorphic motifs like antelope horns, birds, or serpents.
The Zaouli mask is perhaps the most famous, invented in the mid-20th century and said to be inspired by a legendary girl named Dje Lalou Zaouli. Though it is performed by men, it represents a female spirit of beauty and harmony. Zaouli dancers perform in breathtaking, acrobatic rhythm to live drumming, enchanting audiences and invoking community unity, fertility, and peace.
In the Gohitafla region, masks are typically used during funerals, initiation rituals, and communal festivals. Their function is both protective and didactic: they honor ancestors, teach moral values, ward off malevolent forces, and celebrate social harmony. The aesthetics of these masks reflect not just technical virtuosity, but a spiritual elegance—a balance between the seen and the unseen.
As art historian Susan Mullin Vogel explains:
“The Guro mask unites aesthetics with ethical force; it is not merely beautiful, it is right. Its performance becomes a living metaphor for balance—between the male and female, the ancestral and the present, the physical and the spiritual. To witness the mask in motion is to experience art as active blessing.”
(African Art in the Cycle of Life, Susan Vogel, 1986).

Sotheby's

wj

Price on request.

Height: 38 cm / 46 cm incl. stand
Weight: 1,8 kg incl. stand