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Tuesday – Saturday
11am-6pm
24 April — 17 October 2026
Espace Louis Vuitton, Munich

Marking the 20th anniversary of the Espaces Louis Vuitton and the 10th anniversary of the Fondation Louis Vuitton's Hors-les-murs programme, the Espace Louis Vuitton München presents an exhibition devoted to the work of Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal. This exhibition is part of the Hors-les-murs programme, showcasing holdings of the Collection at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul, and Osaka, thereby embodying the Fondation Louis Vuitton's mission to mount international projects and reach a broader global audience.

 

Since the 1990s, Wilhelm Sasnal has developed a body of work that questions our relationship to images, history, and memory. His artistic practice centres on painting, while extending to drawing and film, with a consistent economy of means.

 

At the heart of his approach is a close attention to the images that shape everyday life: press photographs, domestic scenes, film stills, and found documents. Rather than reproducing them, he transforms them – simplifying, cropping, and fragmenting. The image enters an uncertain state, both recognisable and partly withdrawn, creating a tension between visibility and concealment. Painting becomes a space of recomposition where forms emerge and recede, and framing tightens or opens out. Each work proposes a singular mode of seeing, inviting the viewer to project associations and accept uncertainty as part of perception.

 

Sasnal's painting is marked by great formal freedom. He moves from smooth finishes to more spontaneous brushwork, while portraits, landscapes, architecture, and fragments of reality coexist without hierarchy. This mobility reflects an adaptation to the subject rather than a fixed style. Never illustrative, his work carries a quiet unease: seemingly ordinary scenes reveal a historical, political, or emotional depth. History – particularly that of Poland and 20th-century Europe – appears as a diffuse presence embedded in the language of painting.

 

Grey Eyes brings together works from the past two decades, drawn from the Collection and the artist's studio. Assembled by Sasnal himself, it places intimate images in tension with broader resonances. The recurring motif of the eye introduces a reflection on seeing a world saturated with images.

 

Grey – a colour neither fully opaque nor transparent – becomes a sign of ambiguity: eyes that are tired, turned away, or open yet unseeing. Thus, the exhibition raises a simple question: what does it mean to see today? Sasnal offers no fixed answer. His work opens unstable spaces of perception, where what is shown matters as much as what is withheld, reaffirming painting's ability to generate meaning without fixing it.


Installation Views

© Wilhelm Sasnal. Courtesy the Artist and Espace Louis Vuitton, Munich.

Photo: © Jérémie Souteyrat / Louis Vuitton