Exhibitions381 entries
Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures from West Africa
Opens: 04/03/2010 Closes: 04/07/2010
British Museum, London
The ancient Kingdom of Ife has produced some of Africa's most remarkable art. The masterpieces currently on display at the British Museum are so skilfully executed that, upon discovery, they were thought not to be African. One hundred years on and Britain, thankfully, is little more enlightened.
For more information visit: http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/future_exhibitions/kingdom_of_ife/exhibition_ov… Buy: http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/future_exhibitions/kingdom_of_ife/book_tickets.…Page [1]
80 %
Time Out“All that transcendent beauty...” This show is not perfect, but for the jolt of pure artistic achievement it delivers, it would be hard to regard it as anything less than a triumph...
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90%
Financial Times“Realism and technical sophistication...” The British Museum exhibition provides a wealth of information on the world in which these images were created, telling of the immense importance of the head in Yoruba belief, as a seat of spiritual energy...
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90%
this is london“There is a sense of deliberate style...” Among the larger heads, in stone and, particularly, in copper and copper alloys, are objects that to a European have great aesthetic beauty...
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80 %
The Times“A small and as yet mostly unexplained fragment of our shared past...” It is the sculpted heads that will strike the visitor to this show. Spotlit amid the slightly gloomy mazes are visages of such extraordinary individuality that one is pulled up short...
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90%
The Telegraph“Shows like this come along once in a lifetime...” The quality of the full length statues, portrait heads, ritual objects and vessels loaned by Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments is flabbergasting...
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80 %
The Independent“Extraordinary visual seductiveness...” There are intimidatingly indomitable monoliths from sacred groves; there are extraordinary terracotta sculptures of bodies disfigured by ricketts and elephantiasis...
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100%
Guardian“This is an exceptional exhibition...” It elicits awe. To behold these royal heads is to travel to a fabled realm far beyond your imagination, a place richer than Atlantis...
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