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WILHELM SASNAL

artist's work | about the artist | biography | articles | other resources

Selected Works by Wilhelm Sasnal

Wilhelm Sasnal Airplanes 2001, Oil on Canvas 150 x 300cm	Click on images to enlarge
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 Dominika, painted in greyscale, has the allure of outdated photography suggestive of distinctively Eastern European chic.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.