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Biography DOWNLOAD PDF ... John Pangnark was born at Windy Lake in 1920. A member of the Ihalamiut (“people of the other side”), he moved to Arviat on the west coast of Hudson Bay in the late 1950s in order to escape famine. He began making stone sculptures for sale to the local co-op in the mid 1960s, quickly achieving national and international recognition for his singular art. In 1970, he was one of four Inuit invited to demonstrate their carving at the World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan. That same year his sculpture was featured alongside Jessie Oonark’s textiles in a two-person exhibition presented by the National Museum of Man (now the Canadian Museum of Civilization). One of Canada’s most original artists, Pangnark died in 1980. ... No Inuit artist has made formal abstraction a more integral part of his artistic vision than Pangnark. With their pointed forms and sensuously contoured volumes, Pangnark’s images in stone are at once dynamic and enigmatic. The art historian George Swinton called him “the Brancusi of the North, with a rare feeling for abstraction and for the sheer beauty of curved and hard-edged shapes.” Yet formal abstraction had little meaning for Pangnark himself, who conceived of his minimalist sculptures as playful representations of single human forms. The vast majority of his carvings portray women, their gender signified by elegantly elongated shapes denoting traditional women’s parka hoods. Each silhouetted form features Pangnark’s signature and simple four-line face etched onto the stone’s surface.  |
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Press Gallery Exhibitions
Selected Other Exhibitions Public Collections Publications Selected References Gallery
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