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)
3 o’clock road block
9 July - 23 August 2003
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.