Voodoo Ceremony Outdoors with Vodou Chicken Sacrifice

In this work, Haitian Master Wilson Bigaud focuses on fleeting moments of a Voodoo scene. He depicts the sacrifices of two chickens to the spirits. It is a gift to the divine, a way for humans to achieve communion with it or with ancestral spirits (the Loa). Onlookers and neighbors witness the event while a maid washes clothes, oblivious to the ongoing. Bigaud packs the narrative with detail. He gives us a view into a bedroom where a boy is sound asleep, unaffected by the rhythmic drumming and whipping. Biguads' painting technique could be described as post-expressionist, characterized by quick, fluid brushstrokes and punchy colors that mimic the powerful energy of the scenes he captures, with an emphasis on the spiritual over the earthly. Signed and inscribed lower right. Unframed.

Bigaud in Select Museum Collections: MoMA, NY (1947, 1951 Accessions, Inter-American Fund); National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2023 Accession, Kay and Roderick Heller)