It is often the heads and faces of Tiktak’s great sculptures that lend these works their character and impact. Two notable examples are Tiktak’s astonishing Standing Man from 1968, offered at the First Arts auction in June 2022 (Lot 33), and his majestic Mother and Child of 1965-66 [1]. But one only has to survey a group of the artist’s solitary figures, mothers and children, heads, and head clusters (the eleven works in Norman Zepp’s Pure Vision, for example) to realize that Tiktak’s carved heads and faces, whether carved in a coolly elegant or more brutal style, are often the true focal points of his sculptures.

Head has all the hallmarks of Tiktak’s classic facial style of 1964-66, with features that are simplified, stripped down, and almost minimalist. The squinting eyes echo the narrow slit of the mouth; high cheekbones flank an almost Grecian nose; and the shape of the powerful chin balances that of the forehead. Devoid of any other details such as ears or hair, the actual shape of the head is not naturalistic but rather an almost purely sculpted form.

It is as a sculpture and not a likeness of a human head that this masterpiece is best appreciated. Head is an awesomely powerful, truly striking sculpture that holds its own against stylized or abstract depictions that we have seen from around the world and across the millennia - ranging from Cycladic and African sculpture to Modigliani, Brancusi and Moore, and everything in between. To our eyes it is one of the most beautiful sculptures of a human head we have ever encountered. Tiktak’s Head epitomizes what Norman Zepp describes in the introduction to the catalogue Pure Vision: The Keewatin Spirit as “strength and purity of vision.” Fantastic.

1. Illustrated in Ingo Hessel, Inuit Art: An Introduction, (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre / New York: Harry Abrams / London: British Museum Press, 1998), fig. 75; and Norman Zepp, Pure Vision: The Keewatin Spirit, (Regina: Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, 1986), cat. 44.

References: For the 1966 Mother and Child see Ingo Hessel, Inuit Art: An Introduction (1998), p. 97; George Swinton, Tiktak (Winnipeg: Gallery One-One-One, University of Manitoba, 1970), cat. 27; and elsewhere. For other figures see also in the 1970 catalogue see cats. 9, 18, 26, 28, 30, 34. For an important contemporaneous depiction of a head by Tiktak see First Arts, May 2019, Lot 12. See also Ingo Hessel, Arctic Spirit: Inuit Art from the Albrecht Collection at the Heard Museum (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre/Phoenix: Heard Museum, 2006), p. 136 (also shown in Walker’s Auctions, Ottawa, Nov. 2015, Lot 51); The Eskimo Art Collection of the Toronto-Dominion Bank (Toronto, 1972), cat. 46; George Swinton, Sculpture of the Inuit (Toronto: M&S, 1972/92), figs. 648, 650. 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 Darlene Coward Wight, The Harry Winrob Collection of Inuit Sculpture (WAG, 2008), p. 100. See also Walker’s Auctions, Ottawa, May 2016, Lot 25; May 2018, Lot 76.