02 June - 11 July 2009
For his third show at Sadie Coles HQ, Wilhelm Sasnal is showing a series of paintings and a 16mm film. Two main themes emerge from this body of work, those of food sovereignty and earthly idylls. Paintings of a paddy field, unmarked barrels, brightly-coloured food packaging, and a looming truck: all speak of trade, transportation, and global agricultural networks. The politics of food are seen not in the narrow sense of consumerism, but
rather as part of an urgent study of globalisation and currencies of exchange in the modern capitalist era. Other works depict landscapes that are alluring and yet subtly unnerving. As a great wave curls onto shore, it draws the shoreline into a vortex as if a refractory lens were at work. The flawless beach seemingly stretches to infinity, yet thoughts of perfect holidays are undercut by the leaden sky and the eerie shadow cast by the wave. In another work, Untitled (Kacper and Anka), the surface coolness of Sasnal’s blue and grey tones gives way to a quiet and surprising sense of inner reflection and emotional transportation.
Sasnal has emerged as a painter at a time of massive political and social change in his native Poland. Fast and fluent, the surfaces of his paintings might appear blithely detached, yet time spent with them can revive the sense of an image, closing the distance between the experience of reality and its representations. Sasnal shifts continually between the abstract and the figurative, his style and technique mutating accordingly. In this new body of work this is seen as the sky above Sao Paolo is evoked through a grid of intertwined, blurred lines; a tree’s branches are presented as a dense mass of triangles. Sasnal makes work in which it becomes impossible to distinguish the mundane from the mysterious, observation from conceptualism, or history from the here and now. Working largely from photographic images from the media and his own records, Sasnal’s works form a selfreflexive statement on the mediated nature of images in contemporary culture. Further, as other series of work have shown, as in his Middle East pictures in 2006, or his paintings after Spiegelman’s Maus (2001), Sasnal is more passionately engaged with his content than the reductive strokes might have us believe.
Sasnal’s film, Mojave, 2006, was shot among debris of airplanes in the Mojave junkyard, California. By overlaying the scenes with music taken from classic Polish films, Sasnal invests them with an uncanny sense of plot.
Wilhelm Sasnal was born in 1972 in Tarnow, Poland, and now lives and works in Krakow. Between 5
September 2009 and 10 January 2010, K21 in Düsseldorf, Germany, hosts a survey of Wilhelm Sasnal’s last
seven years of work. He has previously had solo shows throughout Europe and the US including Years of
Struggle at the Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw, Poland, 2007; Matrix, at The Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (CA), USA, 2005; Wilhelm Sasnal, The Locker Plant, Marfa (TX), USA; Camden Arts Centre, London, 2004; and Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland, 2003. There are a number of publications on his work including Wilhelm Sasnal: Paintings and Films, published by Veenman Publishers, 2006, and Day Night Day, 2004.
10 Oct - 18 Nov 2006
For his second exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, this particular group of Wilhelm Sasnal’s paintings take an obliquely political viewpoint. The images tangentially refer to energy, power, geopolitics and oil. In addressing these subjects, he utilises an eclectic bank of references, often choosing to hone in on unexpected detail.
Much of the imagery comes from photographic records of Sasnal’s recent travels through Europe, South America, Africa and Texas. In one painting, a map of Africa and South America is reconfigured to show them as neighbours; another painting is of the Atlas mountains in Morocco. Sasnal visualises other sensory experiences, painting the loudspeaker of a mosque as it emits the call to prayer, or the energy field around a microphone on a stand. As well as from his immediate surroundings, Sasnal continues to pluck images from the media; downloaded internet mugshots provide the source for a group of black and white portraits of stereotypical Arab men.
JJ Charlesworth in his essay “Wilhelm Sasnal: Dis-Scription” offers an interesting analysis of Sasnal’s paintings:
Sasnal’s work, for all its apparent coolness, is an art of quiet and surprisingly emotional reflection. Thinking, rethinking and working over the sense of what we encounter in our common visual world, the surface of painting becomes a space of slowed-down exchange, an act which asks us to hold back from the comfortable security of the immediate, single sense of image. Instead, Sasnal’s works encourage us to wait, to linger, to keep looking at the world, because it is not something fixed or finite, but manifold and elusive. For Sasnal, painting is the site where that constant reappraisal can take place […]. As such, his images reveal a deep intimacy with their sources, a paradoxical energy that, because of the ever-probing uncertainty at the heart of his method, bond his paintings inseparably to the things they refer to.
Wilhelm Sasnal has had solo shows throughout Europe and the US, including Matrix, The Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (CA), 2005, Wilhelm Sasnal – Chinati Artist in Residence, The Locker Plant, Marfa (TX), 2005 and at Camden Arts Centre, London, 2004. He was included in the XXVI Bienal de Sao Paolo, 2004 and was shortlisted, with four other finalists, for this year’s Vincent Prize at the Stedelijk Museum.
From JJ Charlesworth, “Wilhelm Sasnal: Dis-Scription”, Wilhelm Sasnal, (London: Sadie Coles HQ, 2004)
9 July - 23 August 2003
3 o’clock road block
In his first show for Sadie Coles HQ, the Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal presents a group of new paintings. As a painter Sasnal deliberately eludes categorisation, working in both the abstract and the figurative, constantly shifting subject matter, technique and style. He often works from both his own snap-shots and appropriated images. Aesthetically, however, the paintings are far removed from the brashness of Pop. With their sober, measured tone they nod more towards the legacy of post-war German and American painting, existing in some respects as formal exercises.
The work toys with the conventions of representation. Sasnal’s use of perspective and focus disrupts our expectations - blue churches hang upside down; at a concert we see only the silhouetted heads and arms of a part of the crowd; at the zoo we are shown a section of the bleak grey stone walls of the enclosures; aerial views of vast sprawling industrial cities become abstract patterns. There is an air of detachment to these experiments through which he attempts to understand and record visual reality.
There is another dimension to these exercises which sees the medium itself become the subject, as Sasnal concentrates on new ways in which to manipulate and apply his paint. In painting seaweed he uses his bare hands, while in his image of a windy tree, it is as if the paint itself has been swept across the paper by the elements. We latch onto the subtitles of the paintings, which indicate to us the subject, while he works towards the real Untitled matter of the painting.
Wilhelm Sasnal was born in Tarnow, Poland, where he continues to live and work. He has had solo and group shows throughout Europe and in the USA, including one person shows this year at MUHKA in Antwerp, Kunstverein in Münster and Kunsthalle Zürich.