Michael Snow at AGH
“Early Snow: Michael Snow 1947 – 1962” at the Art Gallery of Hamilton
February 8, 2020 – March 24, 2020
Guest Curated by James King
Early Snow: Michael Snow 1947-1962 is the first exhibition to focus exclusively on the Canadian artist’s early formative years. The exhibition will comprise over 40 works and reflect Snow’s broad and diverse creative practice.
Guest curated by James King, Professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, the exhibition will feature an ambitious range of media including painting, sculpture, film, video, and works on paper.
Exhibitions and writings dealing with Michael Snow tend to concentrate on his Walking Women works to the exclusion of his earlier work: an important series of abstractions, major sculptures, and a breakthrough series of figurative studies. In concentrating on the artist’s early work, Early Snow demonstrates how the artist’s later career can only be fully appreciated when his formative years are examined and understood.
As such, this exhibition is devoted to the first fifteen years of Michael Snow’s practice. The first work dates to 1947, when Snow was nineteen, and the last to 1962, just as he was leaving Toronto for New York City. By the age of thirty-three (33), his work had already undergone many metamorphoses, and this exhibition will explore his experimentations and the accomplishments achieved during these crucial years.