John Pangnark

John Pangnark was born at Windy Lake, Northwest Territories in 1920 and died at Rankin Inlet, Northwest Territories in 1980. An Inland Caribou Inuit, Pangnark was relocated in the late 1950s to Arviat, where he spent his later years carving. Represented in the seminal international exhibition Sculpture/Inuit: Masterworks of the Canadian Arctic which toured from 1971 to 1973, Pangnark was also one of four Inuit artists chosen to exhibit at Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan. Because of his preoccupation with resolving formal concerns, often at the expense of easily recognizable subject matter, his sculpture is unlike the narrative and naturalistic work of much contemporary Inuit sculpture. Pangnark's work is notable for its frequent use of geometric abstraction and its nearly exclusive focus on the human figure. His highly individualized abstractions are appreciated for their affinity with 20th-century abstract sculpture.