Wilhelm Sasnal - Contemporary Artists

Factory

Wilhelm Sasnal, Factory The Saatchi Gallery
 

Wilhelm Sasnal

Factory

2000, Oil on Canvas

101 x 101cm

Painted from a famous propaganda image, Sasnal's Factory swaps the celebratory ideal of the Socialist Worker for the impersonal hardness of mechanised production. Sasnal treats painting as a reductive process: information is lost in translation from photography to painting.

Using the original photo's black-and-white tones, details are eradicated through heightened contrast, the image simplified through ‘overexposure' and the intervention of the artist's hand. Sasnal's replicated images are dissociated from their once powerful meanings: they exist only as mere vestiges of themselves.
 
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