Although John Pangnark is widely thought of as Inuit art’s most minimalist and abstract practitioner, in fact this artist, his style actually moved back and forth between figural and minimalist, and also between geometric and free-form. Works from the mid-late 1960s tend to be both geometric and figural; his impressive compositions from circa 1972-74 are highly abstract yet they follow the shape of the stone. Around 1975 Pangnark’s style seemed to change yet again. The present Seated Mother and Child is a truly lovely example of the artist’s later free-form style. Rather than working with the natural shape of the stone, Pangnark has chosen to treat it almost like clay. The heads, arms, and legs seem almost to have been squeezed and stretched into shape, almost in the manner of one of the great Dadaist Hans (Jean) Arp’s biomorphic sculptures. One can almost imagine the heads of the mother and child pulling back into the mass of the stone and re-emerging somewhere else, right before our eyes. The result is a sculpture that is elegant, incredibly tactile, and slightly mysterious. Wonderful.

References: For similarly styled contemporaneous works by Pangnark see Norman Zepp, Pure Vision: The Keewatin Spirit (Regina: Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, 1986), cat. 30; Marion Scott Gallery, Inspiration: Four Decades of Sculpture by Canadian Inuit, (Vancouver: Marion Scott Gallery, 1995), cat. 31. For numerous works by Pangnark see Bernadette Driscoll, Eskimo Point/Arviat, (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1982), cats. 59-72.