Toonoo Sharky was elected as a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts when he was thirty-two years old, making him one of the youngest members in the Academy’s history. Astonishingly, by then he had already been carving for twenty-three years and had been a professional artist for about fifteen! Toonoo has been one of the most important Cape Dorset sculptors for over thirty years.

In our December 2022 sale we featured a magnificent Bird of Prey by Toonoo which displayed the artist’s keen sense of observation as well as his technical prowess (Lot 28). Toonoo deserves his place in the pantheon of Inuit figurative sculptors, but he is equally at ease with surreal and abstract forms as he is with naturalistic ones. At first glance this sculpture appears to present us simply with an abstracted and truncated bird form. Closer inspection, however, reveals a substantial pair of aquatic pectoral fins. But not satisfied with merely depicting exciting subject matter, Toonoo has created a truly dynamic and daringly balanced sculptural composition that seems to defy gravity.

References: For similar works by the artist see Ingo Hessel, Arctic Spirit: Inuit Art from the Albrecht Collection at the Heard Museum, (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre / Phoenix: Heard Museum, 2006), cat. 71 (see text); Derek Norton and Nigel Reading, Cape Dorset Sculpture, (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntrye, 2005), p. 76. See the article on the artist by Jessica Tomic-Bagshaw, “Contemporary Artist: Toonoo Sharky” in Inuit Art Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall 2001, pp. 4-6. See also First Arts, Toronto, 5 December 2022, Lot 28.