Wilhelm Sasnal
September 5th 2009 – January 10th 2010
Ständehausstr. 1
40217 Düsseldorf
Germany
With approximately 80 paintings, this is the largest survey of works by this young Polish artist to date outside of his homeland. The show brings together paintings executed over the past decade, and testifies to Sasnal’s development since his public debut in the late 1990s. Wilhelm Sasnal’s works are captivating by virtue of their intricacy and ambivalence, with private, social, and historic motives standing alongside one another on equal terms. Some pictures resemble a consciously simplified, post-communist version of Pop Art, others are reminiscent of comics. Still others pursue a wide spectrum of painting styles, extending all the way into the realm of quasi-abstract “pure” painting.
Sasnal’s impulsive, rapid style of execution, heavily reliant on intuition and spontaneity, communicates directly to viewers, underscoring his capacity for translating complex scenarios into painterly reality. Sasnal is not concerned with defining a recognizable style, but instead with an intelligence of the gaze
that is as individualistic as it is contemporary.
Like few members of his generation, Sasnal conceives of the painted image as reflecting themes and aspects of the present moment, whether local or global. His artistic development began in Kraków in the first post-communist decade. Around 1999, through a rapidly-executed, deliberately banal mode of painting which concentrated entirely on individual objects, he rebelled against Kraków’s academic tradition together with the artist’s group Ładnie (pretty). Deemed “portrait worthy” now were objects such as an LP turntable, a steering wheel, an airbag, and an ashtray. Paintings containing lettering, price tags, or newspaper texts allow real prototypes to become identifiable. Today, nearly all of Sasnal’s paintings are based on either found or self-made photographs. In this context, his artistic activities are conditioned by an awareness that by virtue of the retarding effects of the Communist period in his country, he himself is a witness to a still unconcluded postwar era – a consciousness that forms the subtle substrate of many images. The presentation is configured freely around the classical themes of portrait, landscape, stilllife, genre, and history painting, thereby exploring the larger historical context of the art of Wilhelm Sasnal.
