Drawing, sculpture and cultural hybridity in a first New York solo exhibition engaging Kinngait traditions and global visual culture
Pitseolak Qimirpik, Dancing Shaman I, 2022. Colored pencil on paper, 23.25 x 15 in. Copyright: Copyright The Artist. Courtesy of Fort Gansevoort
Pitseolak Qimirpik’s exhibition ‘Shapeshifter’ marks the artist’s first presentation with Fort Gansevoort, bringing together recent works on paper and small-scale stone sculptures that reflect a distinctive and evolving Inuit visual language. Presented in New York, the exhibition foregrounds Qimirpik’s engagement with drawing and carving as interconnected practices, shaped by both inherited techniques and contemporary cultural reference points.
Working from Kinngait, Nunavut (formerly known as Cape Dorset), Qimirpik belongs to a lineage of artists associated with the West Baffin Cooperative, an artist collective established in 1959 to support artmaking as a sustainable economic practice in the region. While the cooperative is widely recognised for its role in shaping the international reception of Inuit art, Qimirpik’s work signals a generational shift, extending established graphic and sculptural traditions through experimentation, humour and formal flexibility.
Drawing, pattern and narrative experimentation
At the centre of ‘Shapeshifter’ is a group of previously unexhibited works on paper, including a series of monumental multi-panel drawings collectively titled Mix Media (2025). Created specifically for this exhibition, these works depart from Qimirpik’s earlier single-sheet compositions. Composed of multiple individual panels arranged into larger mosaic-like fields, the drawings foreground pattern, repetition and modularity. Their reconfigurable structure allows for varied installation formats, reflecting the artist’s growing interest in how drawings occupy space and how audiences encounter them.
Across these works, composite figures and stylised animals recur, rendered in energetic combinations of colour and line. Arctic wildlife appears alongside hybrid human and animal forms, producing narratives that resist fixed interpretation. Rather than illustrating specific stories, the drawings operate through visual association and transformation, reinforcing the exhibition’s emphasis on mutability and open-ended meaning.
Sculpture, apprenticeship and material continuity
Qimirpik’s sculptural practice is closely tied to his early apprenticeship with his father, the renowned carver Kellypalik Qimirpik. This grounding in carving continues to inform his approach to form, volume and surface, even within his graphic work. The solidity and simplified geometry of his drawn figures echo the tactile presence of stone, underscoring the continuity between media.
The exhibition includes a selection of small stone sculptures that exemplify Qimirpik’s hybrid visual vocabulary. Works such as Marge Becoming a Muskox (2025) merge motifs of Arctic wildlife with references drawn from American popular culture. Carved from serpentine and incorporating caribou antler, the sculpture combines humour with careful material handling, producing forms that acknowledge multiple cultural registers without collapsing into satire. These works reflect contemporary Inuit life as shaped by both local traditions and global media circulation.
Contemporary Inuit art and global reception
While grounded in Inuit carving and drawing traditions, Qimirpik’s practice engages directly with questions of display, reception and audience. The malleable structure of the Mix Media drawings points to an increasing awareness among younger Kinngait artists of how their work is exhibited internationally and interpreted across cultural contexts. This attention to installation and spatial arrangement signals an expanded understanding of graphic art as a site-responsive practice rather than a purely pictorial one.
By positioning Qimirpik’s work within a New York gallery context, ‘Shapeshifter’ contributes to broader discussions around the place of contemporary Inuit art within global art histories. The exhibition does not frame tradition and innovation as opposing forces. Instead, it presents them as coexisting conditions, negotiated through experimentation, cultural reference and material continuity.
‘Pitseolak Qimirpik: Shapeshifter’ is on view at Fort Gansevoort, New York, from 6 February to 4 April 2026. For more information, please visit Fort Gansvoort.
