Vision and Form
The Norman Zepp - Judith Varga Collection of Inuit Art
Curator of Inuit art at the Art Gallery of Ontario from 1988 to
1994, Norman Zepp began collecting Inuit sculpture while still an
undergraduate at the University of Saskatchewan in the late 1960s.
Over the next three decades, Zepp, together with his partner Judith
Varga, went on to assemble one of the country’s most important
and unusual private collections of Arctic art. The pair’s
recent decision to part with their collection was coupled with a
desire to share it with a wider audience and preserve it in book
form for posterity.
With over a hundred colour reproductions of sculptures and wallhangings
representing a variety of artists and regions, Vision and Form does
more than document an extraordinary collection of northern art.
In a series of short essays, curator Robert Kardosh offers insightful
descriptions of the artworks while providing readers with a sense
of the unique cultural and art-historical context from which they
have come. And in an informative introduction, Kardosh discusses
the collection in relation to the collectors, briefly addressing
the current debate over the place of connoisseurship and the role
of southern institutions generally with respect to contemporary
Inuit art.
The book concludes with an afterword by Zepp in which the collector
and former AGO curator recollects his travels throughout the North
and his encounters with many of the artists he has admired over
the years, generously illustrated with remarkable photographs of
the artists in their homes and workspaces.
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