Publisher's Synopsis
Wilhelm Sasnal is one of the most celebrated artists to emerge from Eastern Europe in recent years. His practice embraces drawing, filmmaking, comics (his strips are regularly published in Machinaand Przekroj, two Polish periodicals), and above all painting, which is a reflection of his versatility, being prolific, varied and deliberately unclassifiable.
Sasnal studied Architecture and Art in Kracow in the early 90s, in an interesting time for his country, freshly liberated from the Soviet Regime. In 1996 he co-founded the collective Ladnie (now dissolved), where his work quickly gained reputation for its representation of trivial themes taken from the spheres of everyday life, television, computers, magazines. What emerged later was that by apparently jumping from one subject to another (his subjects could band t-shirts, Pinochet, cars and sometimes even nothing at all) Sasnal was de factochronicling contemporarity, as eventually testified by the publication of Zycie Codzienne W Polsche (Everyday Life in Poland), a visual book exploring the reality and aspirations of people from his generation.
Sasnal’s painting is modern, elegant and discursive. Pop Art, photorealism, abstraction, minimalism, and surrealism are all drawn together to describe the most banal examples of day-to-day reality, rendering everything equal. The limits and possibilities of representation and the process of seeing and perceiving are continuously examined in Sasnal’s work. Similarly, in his films, normally shot in 8 mm – he samples clips to his favorite music combined with real-life events such as the last flight of Concorde or car accidents that at a closer glance turn out to be toy cars under which the artist placed petards.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, who moved to Berlin or Paris as soon as they started having international recognition, Sasnal still resides in his hometown of Tarnów, in the southeast of Poland.
Sasnal was awarded the Vincent Van Gogh Prize in 2006 and was an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, where he had a solo exhibition in 2005. Despite his young age his work has been the subject of a string of solo museum exhibitions, including the Kunsthalle Zurich (2003) the Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster (2003), the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Antwerp (2003), the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2006).
Wilhelm Sasnal is represented by Sadie Coles HQ, London; Anton Kern, New York; Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich; Johen & Schöttle, Cologne; Raster and Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw.
