Lot 7: Michael James Aleck Snow 1928 - Canadian oil on unstretched canvas Walking Woman

Michael James Aleck Snow 1928 - Canadian oil on unstretched canvas Walking Woman
62 x 19 3/4 inches 157.5 x 50.2 centimeters
Provenance:The Isaacs Gallery Ltd., Toronto
Private Collection, Montreal Michael Snow's iconic Walking Woman works are emblematic of the Toronto Pop Art scene in the 1960s. Based on ideas generated from a cardboard cut-out of the walking woman form, which he created as part of a series intended to consist only of five or six works, Snow became interested in the possibilities that this large form presented as a stencil. His explorations of it were many and inventive, and were the sole focus of his work for a period of six years. On canvas and paper, flat sheets of metal and glass, and as a subject for film, she was folded, cut out, draped on dowels, silkscreened into prints and reproduced on T-shirts. She is always the same, yet always different, whether she was painted, sculpted, laser-cut in steel or taken out and placed into the public environment. Whether elongated, distorted, reversed in a mirror image, expanded or shrunk in this iconic series of works, her image challenges our perception of the human form.