Jack Shainman Gallery announces the exhibit, “Michael Snow: A Life Survey (1955-2020)”. In a career that defied categorization in medium or genre, Snow’s work embodied originality over novelty, the cerebral over the conceptual, and evolution over conclusion. It is with this expansive vision that A Life Survey is mounted, offering an intricate and dynamic portrait of Snow’s life and work.
Born in Toronto in 1928, Snow showed an early affinity for creative experimentation. Throughout his youth, he played piano in local jazz bands and received prizes for his early paintings. Snow was influenced most by Modern artists who made work on their own terms, including Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Marcel Duchamp, Willem De Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Yves Klein, and Mark Rothko. In these early years, he described embarking on a “try this, try that” period through which experiences from his professional career, daily life, and jazz improvisations inspired pieces like A to Z, 1956, Drawn Out, 1959, and The Drum Book, 1960.
No body of work exemplifies Snow’s process more than Walking Woman. The series began when Snow cut out a five-foot silhouette from a piece of cardboard. Born from Snow’s imagination, the cut-out outlined a woman in forward motion whose head, arms, and legs were contained by the rectangular edges of the cardboard. From this image, Snow made Four to Five, 1962, a photographic series staging the stencil in real cityscapes; Shot!, 1963, a composition of small papers stamped with the Walking Woman; and Little Walk, 1964, a live-action film and wide ranging sampling of Walking Woman works in his studio, projected on a life-size free-standing Walking Woman cutout. His prerogative was not a conceptual conclusion, but a desire to comprehend the multifaceted meaning of an image when translated through an expansive spectrum of materials.
Michael Snow’s rebellion against traditional genres in artmaking can now be appreciated as a singular aesthetic philosophy of the interconnectedness between all creative mediums—posing diversity of vision as the essential tool for discovery. This exhibition celebrates a panoramic survey of a kaleidoscopic artist who deserves a comprehensive revisitation.
Jack Shainman Gallery: The School | 25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, NY
On View May 21-December 16, 2023
Opening May 21, 2023 | 1-6PM
