John Pangnark’s distinctive style masterfully reduces the human figure to the bare, minimalist essentials. In Figure Looking Up the eyes, nose, and mouth are precisely etched and carved into the stone, while the gentle curves of the head, body, and limbs are merely suggested. The stone is patterned with delicate tool marks revealing the hand of the artist; we can almost feel Pangnark turning the piece this way and that, seeing and feeling every hill and hollow as the figure was being made. His earliest works already sit on the abstract side of the scale, but this charming example wanders happily further into the amorphous end of the spectrum. Dreamy and gorgeous.

References: For a similarly styled work by Pangnark see First Arts, 12 July 2020, Lot 30. For a discussion of the work of Pangnark see Norman Zepp, Pure Vision: The Keewatin Spirit (Regina: Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, 1986); for works see pp. 74-85; see especially cat. 30, p. 84.