SAATCHI GALLERY
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SELECTED WORKS BY Wilhelm Sasnal



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Wilhelm Sasnal

Airplanes

2001
Oil on Canvas

150 x 300cm

Wilhelm Sasnal approaches painting as a formal exercise. He often borrows subjects from art history, 20th century propaganda, and photojournalism. Airplanes is a dark appropriation of Alighiero Boetti's famous airplane drawings. Subverting the original pastoral optimism, Wilhelm Sasnal's planes are engulfed in smoke as if they've been hit by enemy fire.

Wilhelm Sasnal deconstructs the hierarchy of 'high culture' by filtering it through mass-media association. Through painting, Sasnal explores his own interpretation and understanding of imagery. His work constantly questions the space between ‘personal' and ‘public', and strives to define individual experience within a world order of collective consciousness.


Wilhelm Sasnal

Girl Smoking (Peaches)

2001
Oil on Canvas

33 x 33cm


Wilhelm Sasnal

Girl Smoking (Dominika)

2001
Oil on Canvas

33 x 33cm


Wilhelm Sasnal

Girl Smoking (Anka)

2001
Oil on Canvas

45 x 50cm

Wilhelm Sasnal's portraits of women explore modern concepts of beauty and representation. The pop star Peaches is given a degenerate Warhol glam; Anka, the alabaster sophistication of Katz. Dominika, painted in greyscale, has the allure of outdated photography suggestive of distinctively Eastern European chic.

Wilhelm Sasnal approaches feminine idealism as a construct of fashion. It's not the physicality of the women themselves, but rather the style with which they're represented. Each rendered in a manner associated with a specific time and place, Wilhelm Sasnal's portraits aren't classical icons, but models defined by their own sell-by dates. All pictured smoking a cigarette, Sasnal alludes to the slow self-destruction of their beauty.


Wilhelm Sasnal

Factory

2000
Oil on Canvas

101 x 101cm

Painted from a famous propaganda image, Wilhelm 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. Wilhelm Sasnal's replicated images are dissociated from their once powerful meanings: they exist only as mere vestiges of themselves.


Wilhelm Sasnal

Man at the Control Panel

2000
Oil on Canvas

180 x 160cm

Man at the Control Panel has the design of a government-issue poster. Through the act of painting, Wilhelm Sasnal divests this once authoritative image of any sense of infused power. It becomes merely an advertisement for banality, an explicit logo of its own defunct politics.

Through the personal intervention of making, Wilhelm Sasnal promotes a democratisation of image ownership. Through painting all things are rendered equal.


Wilhelm Sasnal

Portrait of Rodchenko, Lady

2002
Oil on Canvas

30 x 30cm

For Wilhelm Sasnal, painting is imperative as a means to challenge traditional expectations of representation and perception. Through the personal intervention of making, his subject matter becomes distorted. Images are pared down to their barest essentials and estranged from their original context and meaning.

Portrait of Rodchenko, Lady resurrects the photographer's iconic image. Gone is her golden Soviet virtue, replaced by a fiercely dark shadow. Wilhelm Sasnal's reconstruction is a hollow memento, a death mask of a graven image.


Wilhelm Sasnal

Car

2002
Oil on Canvas

181 x 181cm

Flirting with the future, Wilhelm Sasnal’s space-age car is an unnervingly anthropomorphic vehicle promising a super determinism of technological prowess. Looming just beyond imagination, Car retains all its untold visual mystery; only a suggestive glimpse fits the canvas. It is not what the viewer sees that is important, but the disconcerting Orwellian sense that Car is looking back.


Wilhelm Sasnal

Portrait

2001
Oil on Canvas

50 x 73cm

Wilhelm Sasnal's green lady is marbled perfection: a towering sculptural goddess executed as an anonymous product of design. Cropped, chin jutting out: her once symbolic mysticism now holds only graphic optimism, a pleasant hallmark of simplified form and bright colours. Wilhelm Sasnal repackages ideology for an indiscriminate consumer culture. Painting becomes a ritual of purification through aesthetics, which can sell even the most frightening of concepts.


Wilhelm Sasnal

Terrorist Equipment

2000
Oil on Canvas

63 x 80 cm

Sasnal draws his subject matter from day-to-day reality. The most banal examples of still life mingle with commensurate importance to propaganda icons, advertising, and photojournalistic imagery.

An ambiguous Tuymans-like rendering of a suicide bomber's belt/parachute/life jacket is painted with the impartiality of an instruction-manual illustration. Terrorist Equipment is dissociated from any political meaning, rendered inconsequential in the cold vernacular of documentation.


Wilhelm Sasnal

Gym Lesson

2000
Oil on Canvas

150 x 150cm

Gym Lesson offers a colourless documentation of children at play, reminiscent of Soviet social painting stripped of all joyous idealism. Emptying the image of vivacious allure, Sasnal's painting operates as palimpsest: through its impartial and sterile surface, only faint traces of historical significance remain.


Wilhelm Sasnal

Landscape

2001
Oil on Canvas

36 x 40cm

In Landscape, a row of Eastern European houses is half obliterated by a smoke bomb. In an image reminiscent of news clippings, Sasnal impersonalises the violence until it becomes nothing more than a perfect cloud. Dehumanised to the point of abstraction, Sasnal reduces horror to a mere formalist problem: a structural composition of terror; a self-absorbed contemplation of the sublime.


Wilhelm Sasnal

Arms Raised

2001
Oil on Canvas

33 x 36cm

Through rich and incongruous application techniques, Sasnal uses the paint itself to expose the paradoxical qualities of image interpretation. In Arms Raised, he subverts the documentary ‘truth' of photography. Rendered in negative, his image of a champion becomes a hostage and heroicism is shrouded in a demonic aura. Sasnal exposes cultural triumph as conspiracy, inherently underscored with apocalyptic sensations of revulsion and fear.


Wilhelm Sasnal

Resort

1999
Oil on Canvas

89 x 89 cm

Sasnal presents the usual vacation ideals of sun, booze, and sex through a voyeuristic binocular view. Under surveillance scrutiny, the luxury resort emerges as something lonely, corrupt, and comically sad. Painted with a knowing faux naïveté, Resort is offered to all as an international logo/pictograph, loaded with overtures of condescension and imperialism.



ARTIST INFORMATION




Wilhelm Sasnal's BIOGRAPHY






1980
Born, Chesterfield, Derbyshire

Lives and works in London


SOLO EXHIBITIONS


2009
Regina Gallery, Moscow
Project Room, Alison Jacques Gallery, London

2008
Census, Engholm Engelhorn, Vienna
Art Basel, Miami Beach, Engholm Engelhorn, Miami

2004
Eight Years Ago and Before, Bloc Space, Sheffield


GROUP EXHIBITIONS


2009
Bolte&Lang, Zurich
Newspeak, Saatchi Gallery at The Hermitage, St. Petersburg
Jerwood Contemporary Painters Prize, Jerwood Space, London (touring)

2008
Moravia, Cell Project Space, London
Make Believe, Concrete & Glass, London
Cory Michael Project, London
Ibid Projects, The Armory Show, New York
The Painting Room, Transition Gallery, London

2007
Wassail, Cell Project space, London
Summer School, Ibid Projects, London
The Great Exhibition, Royal College Of Art, London
Celeste Art Prize, Old Truman Brewery, London
Droppingʼs, Blythe Gallery, Imperial College, London

2006
Saudade, Highbury Studios, London
Seeking Tacit Utopias, Surface Gallery, Nottingham
Scholarship Exhibition, Jerwood Space, London
Pleasure Yourself, Howie Street London

2004
Dialogues and Disclosures, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield 1976
Born in Baltimore, Maryland

Lives and works in New York City


SOLO EXHIBITIONS


2006
D’Amelio Terras, New York


GROUP EXHIBITIONS


2006
Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance), Bellwether, New York
Thin Walls, Curated by Sara Greenberger, Klaus Von Nichtssagend
Gallery, Brooklyn, New York
History Lesson 3, Curated by Monica Moran, Gavin Brown’s
Passerby, New York
Psychic Reality, Bellwhether Gallery, New York

2005
The General’s Ja`mboree, Guild & Greyshkul, New York

2004
Guild & Greyshkul at Placemaker Gallery, Miami, Florida

2003
Downtown for Democracy, Phillips, New York, New York
Central Park: An Exclusive Photography Exhibition and Event, Curated By Vanina Holasek, The Central Park Arsenal, New York
The Vice Photography Show, Seize Sur Vingt, New York

2002
Benefit Show and Auction, Gale Gates Gallery, Brooklyn, New York
Show, Xcin, Los Angeles, California
Last Night, Last Weekend, Rivington Arms Gallery, New York

2001
An Exhibition of Young Artists, Sotheby’s, New York
Move Eight, Chance Operations Gallery, Denver, Colorado

2000
NATO Arts, New York 1972
Born in Tarnow, Poland
Currently lives and works in Tarnow

1999
Graduated from Krakow Academy of Fine Art

1996-2001
Co-founder and member of Ladnie Group


SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS


2004
Wilhelm Sasnal: The Band Hauser & Wirth,
Zürich ZawaSrod Galerie Johnen & Schöttle,
Cologne

2003
Wes tfälischer Kunstverein, Münster
Kunshalle Zürich, Zürich

2002
Galerie Johnen & Schöttle, Cologne
Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw
Parel, Amsterdam

2001
Cars and Men Galeria Foksal, Warsaw
Everyday Life in Poland between 1999 and 2000 Galeria Raster,
Warsaw

2000
Accident Bagat Showroom, Warsaw
Board Game Galeria Potocka, Krakow

1999
One Hundred Pieces Galeria Zderzak, Krakow
Crowd Open Gallery, Krakow
Painting CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw

1998
A National Holiday Galeria Otwarta, Krakow
Private-Public Open Gallery, Krakow


SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS


2004
Camden Arts Centre, London (with Ben Ravenscroft,
Sam Basu & Michael Marriott)
Map Trap Galeria Raster, Warsaw
T-ow Anton Kern Gallery, New York

2003
Wisla Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv
3 O’clock Road Block Sadie Coles HQ, London

2002
Kunsthalle, Basel
Kwangju Biennale Kwangju, Korea
Urgent Painting Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de
Paris, Paris

2001
New Collection of the CCA and the Loan of the Foksal
Gallery, CCA

Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw
The Good Galeria Raster, Warsaw
Tirana Biennale Tirana, Albania
Bureaucracy Galeria Foksal, Warsaw
Pop-elite Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow
In Between Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago
Fisheye BWA gallery, Slupsk

2000
Scena 2000 CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw
Visual Art - Simple Life Edit-Russ-Haus, Oldenburg
100% Painting BWA gallery, Posen
Paint Me BWA, Zielona Góra

1999
What you see is what you get Medium Gallery, Bratislava

1997
Seven Young Painters French Cultural Institute, Krakow

 
 

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