As a video artist, Michael Snow is revered, especially among critics and curators, for his ground breaking work in experimental cinema. But his films can also be easy to dismiss: his work is often so fragmentary, so seemingly incomplete, that it can be hard to understand what all the fuss is about. Yet no other artist has done so much to destabilise our approximation of the visible than Michael Snow. By threatening the very tools we rely on to process what we perceive, the artist creates unnerving yet frequently poetic works. His avant-garde film-making is less about a way of understanding the camera as a device for recording than as an instrument whose structural, material properties can form the main focus of the work. Michael Shaw´s rich and rigorous meditations on cinematic practice can be seen in his first solo show in Spain at Àngels Barcelona with two new video-installations and a film that will rank among Barcelona´s best exhibitions this month.
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Michael Snow
5 May - 13 June
Àngels Barcelona
www.angelsbarcelona.com
