64 RIGHT: Paddle club, ‘akau tau. Tonga Islands. Wood. L: 98 cm. To be offered at Bonhams, Los Angeles, on December 6, 2016. Est. $20,000–30,000. BELOW: Group of pounders from a variety of Pacifi c islands. Photo: Douglas Dawson Gallery. Affiche de l’exposition Didier Claes @ Patrick de Brock Gallery, à Knokke-le-Zoute. Masque. Grebo, Côte d’Ivoire. Bois et pigments. H. : 40 cm. Galerie Claes, rentrée 2016 © Studio Philippe de Formanoir-Paso Doble. Boli. Bamana, Mali. Matériaux composites. L. : 35 cm. Provenance : Collection privée. Galerie Claes, rentrée 2016 © Studio Philippe de Formanoir-Paso Doble. ART IN MOTION The Art of Stone CHICAGO—For many cultures, stone tools have been much more than utilitarian artifacts. In example after example, it is obvious that the toolmakers were making aesthetic as well as practical decisions about their work. The grain of the stone, its texture, color, and natural imperfections were observed and incorporated into the tool, imparting beauty in addition to utility. The fact that many tools have been discovered in ritually conceived settings also implies that another level of meaning was collectively understood. Whether the primordial connection between stone and humanness was intuitive or consciously understood doesn’t matter. What does matter is that for more than three million years, humans have maintained a constant relationship with stone that has lessened only in the recent past. On September 9, the Douglas Dawson Gallery will open Stone! 1,000,000 BC–AD 1940, an exhibition that will present stone tools from a variety of sources and across time in an abstracted context that has nothing to do with how they were fashioned or used by ancient man. Instead, they are presented as startlingly beautiful objects. Their economy of form, surface texture, and intrinsic lithic properties make them immediately accessible to us humans at this end of a million-year-long timeline. Bonhams LOS ANGELES—Bonhams will hold a sale this autumn on December 6 featuring a mixture of African, Oceanic, and Pre-Columbian art. The latter has rarely been offered by this auction house in recent years, since it is committed to offering only works with iron-clad provenances that place them outside their countries of origin prior to 1971. One highlight of this sale will be an especially fi ne paddle club most likely carved by stone in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century that is incised throughout the surface with geometric patterns, people, birds, and fi sh (probably sharks). One of the human fi gures appears to be interacting with a fi sh, perhaps as a visual reference to the practice of noosing sharks, associated with the village of Navutoka.
T81E
To see the actual publication please follow the link above