DAVIE ATCHEALAK (1947-2006) PANNIRTUQ (PANGNIRTUNG) / IQALUIT (FROBISHER BAY)
Dancing Bear, late 1980s
stone, 21.75 x 14.5 x 6.5 in (55.2 x 36.8 x 16.5 cm)
signed, "DAVIE / ATCHEALAK".

Provenance
An Ottawa Collection.

Throughout the 1970s most Inuit sculptures of the polar bear could be roughly sorted into two different camps: the stylized bears popularized by Pauta Saila which seemed to capture the “spirit” of the polar bear, or the naturalistic bears of artists like Henry Evaluardjuk which usually presented the subject with greater realism. Indeed, to this day, such is the renown of the two pioneers that collectors refer to their works branded simply as either “Pauta bears” or “Henry bears”. In the 1980s Davie Atchealak began to take the polar bear in a completely new direction.

Atchealak was not only a supremely gifted sculptor, his works in stone and bone reveal that he had the gift of showmanship as well. His finest works, of which this magnificent Dancing Bear is a sterling example, display a flourish of almost baroque style and detail, as evidenced in the fringes of fur along the chest and legs or the meticulously detailed dentition. One can also see that “Davie” intuitively understood the engineering aspects of sculpture better than almost any of his contemporaries. Both his bears and his drum dancers often feature the subjects in positions where much of the weight is very off-center, but where the stress is offset by a cantilevered landscape element from which the subject seems to spring forth. Behold the “Davie bear”!

Such was the appeal of Davie’s sculptures that his magnificent whale bone sculpture of a bare-chested drum dancer (now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada) established a world auction record for an Inuit sculpture in 1989 which stood for almost two decades!

References: For a similarly posed bear by Atchealak see Amway Environmental Foundation, Masters of the Arctic: Art In The Service Of The Earth, (Ada, MI: Amway Environmental Foundation, 1989), p. 18. For examples of a large-scale sculpture by Atchealak see Ingo Hessel, Inuit Art: An Introduction, (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre / New York: Harry Abrams / London: British Museum Press, 1998), fig. 74, p. 95; Ingo Hessel, Arctic Spirit: Inuit Art from the Albrecht Collection at the Heard Museum, (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre / Phoenix: Heard Museum, 2006), cats. 29 and 147; First Arts Auction, November 2021, Lot 120.