Wilhelm Sasnal
Airplanes
2001, Oil on Canvas
150 x 300cm |
Click on images to enlarge
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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.
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Wilhelm Sasnal
Girl Smoking (Peaches)
2001, Oil on Canvas
33 x 33cm |
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Wilhelm Sasnal
Girl Smoking (Dominika)
2001, Oil on Canvas
33 x 33cm |
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Wilhelm Sasnal
Girl Smoking (Anka)
2001, Oil on Canvas
45 x 50cm |
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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of outdated photography suggestive of distinctively Eastern European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.
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Wilhelm Sasnal
Factory
2000, Oil on Canvas
101 x 101cm |
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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.
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Wilhelm Sasnal
Man at the Control Panel
2000, Oil on Canvas
180 x 160cm |
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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.
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Wilhelm Sasnal
Portrait of Rodchenko, Lady
2002, Oil on Canvas
30 x 30cm |
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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.
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Wilhelm Sasnal
Car
2002, Oil on Canvas
181 x 181cm |
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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.
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Wilhelm Sasnal
Portrait
2001, Oil on Canvas
50 x 73cm |
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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.
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Wilhelm Sasnal
Terrorist Equipment
2000, Oil on Canvas
63 x 80 cm |
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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.
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Wilhelm Sasnal
Gym Lesson
2000, Oil on Canvas
150 x 150cm |
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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.
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Wilhelm Sasnal
Landscape
2001, Oil on Canvas
36 x 40cm |
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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.
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Wilhelm Sasnal
Arms Raised
2001, Oil on Canvas
33 x 36cm |
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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.
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Wilhelm Sasnal
Resort
1999, Oil on Canvas
89 x 89 cm |
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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.
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