Kenojuak Ashevak

Even before the success of the print program at Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Kenojuak Ashevak expressed her visions in stone in the mid to late 1950s. Never a prolific sculptor, her early works are particularly uncommon. The present sculpture is a rare work dating to the artist’s late 1950s to early 1960s period, and comes from the collection of Charles Gimpel, co-founder of the important Westminster and London-based art gallery Gimpel-Fils.

A photographer, as well as a collector and art dealer, Charles Gimpel (known as “Ukjuk” or Bearded Seal to the Inuit because of his sideburns) travelled in the Canadian Arctic on numerous occasions between 1958 and 1968, and became entranced by Inuit art, acquiring numerous important early works on his visits.[1]

Gimpel’s pioneering Westminster gallery was a centre for Inuit art in England. Works offered by Gimpel included creations by artists such as Parr, Akeeaktashuk, and Kenojuak Ashevak. Notably, Gimpel exhibited these works directly alongside important contemporary English and American art by sculptors including Henry Moore, and Isamu Noguchi.[2]

[1] Richard Crandall, Inuit Art, A History (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2000), 126.
[2] Kay Gimpel, The Charles Gimpel Collection of Innuit Drawings 1961-1966 (Toronto: The Yanneff Gallery, 1983)