Additional Images

Provenance:

Marion Scott Gallery, Vancouver, BC;
Donald Ellis Gallery, New York, NY;
Private collection, British Columbia

Literature:

Donald Ellis, Gallery Catalogue, (Toronto: Donald Ellis Gallery Ltd., 2012) 75, pl. 26

Exhibited:

Modern Vision, Inuit Masterworks from The 1960s and 1970s, Marion Scott Gallery, Vancouver, BC, 23-28 July, 2012;
Two Thousand Years of Inuit Art, Frieze Masters Art Fair, Donald Ellis Gallery, London, UK, 5-8 October, 2017

Note:

An artist’s sensibilities were perhaps never better suited to the materials available to them than John Pangnark’s were to the hard, unyielding stone of Arviat (Eskimo Point), where he settled in the 1950s following early years living off the land. [1]

The first documented sculptures by Pangnark, while abstract, have readily identifiable anatomical elements, a characteristic that would recede in later works, subsumed by an increasing degree of abstraction and unparalleled confidence in line and volume.

The present sculpture made during Pangnark’s 1960s era production is notable for its masterful interplay between early and mid-period characteristics. From within the natural character and geometry of the stone emerge the hard edges of a figure, its head and limbs appear in stilled movement, and as though cloaked or in silhouette. A defining characteristic of the artist’s work, the figure’s simple face radiates calm—a whisper of fine lines, it is rendered with the utmost subtlety. The face and expression is echoed by that of a small child swaddled on the back of the figure in a touching image of mutual affection.

(1) Norman Zepp, Pure Vision, The Keewatin Spirit, (Regina: Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery University of Regina, 1986), 75.