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Nathan Mabry — Tete de Femme (Spicy)
Nathan Mabry — Tete de Femme (Spicy)
Nathan Mabry — Tete de Femme (Spicy)
Nathan Mabry

Tete de Femme (Spicy)

2011

Tete de Femme (Spicy) presents a towering female figure assembled from a deliberately dissonant collection of materials, standing nearly eight feet tall and demanding immediate physical reckoning from anyone who enters its presence. Nathan Mabry brings together cast aluminum, a BagaD'umba shoulder mask, wood, epoxy clay, stainless steel, and a novelty sausage into a single vertical composition that collapses the hierarchies typically assigned to fine art objects, ethnographic artifacts, and cheap commercial novelties. The result is a work that is simultaneously monumental and absurdist, formally rigorous and quietly irreverent, channeling the legacy of Cubist portraiture while refusing to treat that legacy with any particular solemnity. Mabry built his reputation through sculpture that interrogates how Western art history has borrowed, fetishized, and mythologized objects from non-Western cultures, and this work sits at the center of those concerns. The incorporation of the BagaD'umba mask, a ceremonial object associated with West African ritual traditions, directly invokes the well-documented relationship between twentieth-century avant-garde artists and the African objects they absorbed into their formal vocabularies, often stripped of cultural context. The title itself, riffing on Picasso's recurring subject, makes that conversation explicit without belaboring it. What distinguishes this piece for the serious collector is the precision with which Mabry calibrates humor against critique. The novelty sausage is not a lazy provocation but a carefully placed signal that everything in the work, including its own critical posture, is available for scrutiny. Signed by the artist and offered through Visual Artists Group, Tete de Femme (Spicy) represents a confident and fully resolved statement from a sculptor whose work continues to gain institutional and scholarly attention.

Medium
Aluminum, BagaD'umba shoulder mask, wood, epoxy clay, novelty sausage, stainless steel
Overall
Signed
Yes
Location
Visual Artists Group, Los Angeles, CA

For Sale — $58000

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About this work

Nathan Mabry, Tete de Femme (Spicy), 2011

Tete de Femme (Spicy) presents a towering female figure assembled from a deliberately dissonant collection of materials, standing nearly eight feet tall and demanding immediate physical reckoning from anyone who enters its presence. Nathan Mabry brings together cast aluminum, a BagaD'umba shoulder mask, wood, epoxy clay, stainless steel, and a novelty sausage into a single vertical composition that collapses the hierarchies typically assigned to fine art objects, ethnographic artifacts, and cheap commercial novelties. The result is a work that is simultaneously monumental and absurdist, formally rigorous and quietly irreverent, channeling the legacy of Cubist portraiture while refusing to treat that legacy with any particular solemnity. Mabry built his reputation through sculpture that interrogates how Western art history has borrowed, fetishized, and mythologized objects from non-Western cultures, and this work sits at the center of those concerns. The incorporation of the BagaD'umba mask, a ceremonial object associated with West African ritual traditions, directly invokes the well-documented relationship between twentieth-century avant-garde artists and the African objects they absorbed into their formal vocabularies, often stripped of cultural context. The title itself, riffing on Picasso's recurring subject, makes that conversation explicit without belaboring it. What distinguishes this piece for the serious collector is the precision with which Mabry calibrates humor against critique. The novelty sausage is not a lazy provocation but a carefully placed signal that everything in the work, including its own critical posture, is available for scrutiny. Signed by the artist and offered through Visual Artists Group, Tete de Femme (Spicy) represents a confident and fully resolved statement from a sculptor whose work continues to gain institutional and scholarly attention.

Medium
Aluminum, BagaD'umba shoulder mask, wood, epoxy clay, novelty sausage, stainless steel
Dimensions
overall: 229.9 x 71.1 x 61 cm
Year
2011
Signed
Hand-signed by the artist
Seen at
Visual Artists Group, Los Angeles, CA

Related themes

Mohn Art Collective

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