Nadine
The pioneer Inuit art scholar and author George Swinton was greatly attracted to the sculpture of John Tiktak and in 1970 chose him for the first major public solo exhibition of an Inuit artist's work. Swinton believed that Tiktak, like Henry Moore, was a genius image-maker who could envision human figures as assemblages of primal forms and open spaces. Already in a 1966 article in Canadian Art, Swinton had compared Tiktak to Moore:

His sophistication of form is such that he arrives at primal shapes. And his communication is such that he requires the most elemental statements in content and form: he communicates elemental matter through primal form. Yet in this very simplicity he achieves a sophistication that comes only from struggle with thought and its distillation into form. It is precisely in this regard that he resembles Moore. [1]

Tiktak’s sculptural style had been relatively cool and elegant in the early-mid 1960s but became starkly expressive and even brutal before the end of the decade. An old injury sustained while he was working at the Rankin Inlet nickel mine bothered him, and he began relying more on power tools by 1968. The apparent lack of “finesse” in his later works was replaced by ever greater emotional and psychological intensity. Tiktak's figures became increasingly rugged and raw even, but arguably even more powerful. Mother and Child, from about 1970, is a particularly moving and poignant example from this period. The mother’s visage is almost skeletal, while the child seems to cry for help. Extraordinary.

1. George Swinton, "Artists from the Keewatin" in Canadian Art, (April 1966: 32-34), p. 34.

References: For various fine examples of mother-and-child sculptures by the artist see First Arts, 28 May 2019, Lot 44; 1 Dec. 2020, Lot 110; (and again 12 June 2023, Lot 58); 13 July 2021, Lot 23; 14 June 2022, Lot 109. See several examples in George Swinton, Tiktak: Sculptor from Rankin Inlet, N.W.T., (Winnipeg: Gallery One-One-One, University of Manitoba School of Art, 1970). See the section on the artist in Norman Zepp, Pure Vision: The Keewatin Spirit, (Regina: Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, 1986), pp. 96-107. See also Bernadette Driscoll, Rankin Inlet/Kangirlliniq, (Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1981), 78-87. See also Gerald McMaster ed., Inuit Modern: The Samuel and Esther Sarick Collection, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2010), p. 126. For numerous examples from the 1960s see George Swinton, Sculpture of the Inuit, (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972/92), figs. 648-665.