A Lobi headstake

A Lobi headstake (baathil / pole head), Kampti village, Poni province (Burkina Faso), with a high abstrct fascial plane, characterised by his expressive features, with a cap-like hairstyle,, remnants of white kaolin, incl. stand.

Is there a relation between Lobi art and the scuptural work of Georg Baselitz?

Yes — there is credible evidence that Georg Baselitz was inspired by African tribal sculpture, including Lobi figures, in his sculptural work. Baselitz himself acknowledged that one of his early wooden sculptures, which caused a scandal because the raised arm was interpreted in Germany as a Nazi salute, was actually modelled on a Lobi figure.

Art‑historical analysis supports this: his rough, aggressively carved wooden heads retain the knots and cracks of the material in a way reminiscent of tribal totems.

Baselitz collected African art for decades, and although he sometimes admitted he did not fully understand the original symbolic meaning of the figures, he was fascinated by their formal power.

In an interview he described his sculptural process as obsessive and physical: he saw, dreamed, and thought about a sculpture “day and night,” especially when working in wood — and cited specifically the Batateba figures of the Lobi as a formal reference, particularly for the outstretched arm motif.

In sum, Baselitz did not merely appropriate Lobi forms, but internalised aspects of their aesthetics and translated them into his own expressive, post‑war sculptural idiom.

There is no direct historical connection between Baselitz’s heads and the Lobi head sculptures, yet a comparative reading reveals notable structural analogies. Since the late 1960s, Baselitz has developed a physiognomic language in which the head is treated as an autonomous, often oversized, deformed, and inverted form, detached from anatomical continuity. This radical isolation functions as an aesthetic strategy, destabilizing perception, identity, and corporeality.¹

Lobi heads, especially those used as headstakes or thil markers, operate within a wholly different cultural matrix. They reduce the head to an energetic center, where presence, memory, and spiritual agency converge. Deformations, enlargements, or compressions do not express subjective feeling but rather convey functional elevation: the head serves as the locus of communication with the thil, a point of vulnerability and simultaneously of spiritual control.²

The structural intersection lies less in influence than in a shared tendency to abstract the physiognomic form. Both Baselitz and the anonymous Lobi carvers detach the head from naturalistic representation to intensify its significance. In Baselitz, this intensification manifests as a deliberate roughness, grotesqueness, and unfinished quality; in the Lobi, it emerges through codified, cultic reduction, where the head’s austerity renders visible the distance between physicality and metaphysical field. The affinity is thus structural rather than historical: a convergence of two artistic systems that treat the head as a paradigmatic site of meaning.³

¹ Koepplin, Baselitz und die Physiognomie der Umkehr, Basel 1995.
² Hébert, Le système religieux des Lobi, Paris 1967.
³ Vogel, “The Transformation of the Head in African Ritual Sculpture,” African Arts, 1981.

Height: 58 cm incl. stand
Weight: 4,3 kg incl. stand