Wilhelm s a s n a l

H a u s der k
Haus der Kunst
Prinzregentenstraße 1
80538 Munich
+49 89 21127 113
mail @ hausderkunst.de
www.hausderkunst.de
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Wilhelm
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Opening hours Haus der Kunst:
Mo - Su 10 am - 8 pm / Thurs 10 am - 10 pm
Opening hours Sammlung Goetz
at Haus der Kunst: Fr - Su 10 am - 8 pm
S t r e t c h
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Wilhelm
S a s n a l
“Painting is not a game, not something
you do just for fun; it comes with a
responsibility that I take very seriously.”
Over the last two decades, Wilhelm Sasnal (*1972 in
Tarnow, Poland) has developed an exceptional body
of work that addresses questions of relevance and the
possibilities of painting in the context of contemporary visual languages. In this age of information
overload through photographic images, Sasnal’s paintings explore, in a very subtle manner, “picture
making.” They thereby provide evidence of a continuous
fascination with painting. The greatest power resides
in his paintings’ ability to seduce the viewer to
slow down and pay heightened attention to what at first
sight may seem a very ordinary subject matter.
title, but often the specifics are only known to the
artist. This is not to enlist us in a game of hideand-seek, but to invite others to bring their own chain
of associations to a particular work.
“Painting perhaps can contain more narrative than film.
However, both share a certain atmosphere of anticipation.”
The exhibition is not intended to be a retrospective
summarizing the development of Sasnal’s work. Instead,
it focuses on works produced since 2000. The presentation represents an approximate chronology of the
paintings, the arrangement of which takes no account of
motif or thematic connections, but rather attempts to
establish formal resonances and variable comparisons.
1
Most of the paintings are based on material from
various sources. Anything can become suitable subject
matter for one of Sasnal’s paintings as long as it
is both sufficiently particular and universal: from
scientific images and urban nightscapes; from portraits of his family and friends to the crotch of a man
seated in an arm chair; from travel photographs
to images relating to the more troubling chapters of
Polish history during the Second World War and the
Holocaust. Sasnal also makes use of the various historical styles of painting with the same implicitness:
he blends romantic atmosphere with cool realism and
ironic pop, whereby he playfully overcomes the traditional distinctions between abstraction and representation. Nevertheless, his entire body of work is
marked by a knowledge of the artist and his love of
the foundations and processes of painting.
Unlike previous generations of painters, Sasnal is
less interested in the legitimacy of painting and
its swan song. Rather, for him, painting is a way of
rescuing significant images out of the visual flood
that would otherwise be abandoned to oblivion. The
process of selecting and painting these images is the
result of a conscious decision by the artist to lend
them exceptional cultural importance. These include
images that invoke matters of history, politics,
family, life, friendship, pop culture and art history.
Often these subjects contain a hidden story that may
relate to a specific moment in our lives. Sometimes
these stories are made explicit through a particular
Bathers at Asnières, 2010
Room 1
“An artist must be aware of the world and the society
of which he or she is part. I do not believe that
painting is a solitary practice or has anything to
do with withdrawing from society.”
2
The selection of works executed between 2001 and 2005
are characterized by a strong sense of place and it
includes paintings of Polish cities to which Sasnal has
a particular connection; for example, his home town
of Tarnow or the city north of it, Kielce, where Jewish
citizens were attacked by civilians following the war.
Churches, family and music also constituted important
subject matter during this period.
Some of the paintings here relate directly to films.
Shoah (Translator) refers to the nine-hour documentary
by Claude Lanzmann, while Duel 1 — 3 deals with Steven
Spielberg’s eponymous first feature film from 1971.
Sasnal’s image selection usually results from a spontaneous reaction to the impression an image leaves
on him, although it is immaterial to him whether the
image is a document of contemporary historical significance or an unimportant representation. For
instance, Untitled, a landscape with four figures dramatic in its black and white contrasts - is based
on a Polish textbook for amateur photographers. The
sources on which he bases his works are not explicitly
mentioned, although Sasnal speaks about them in
conversation. At the same time, with his use of Internet
images as models, it has become easier to research
these.
The critical confrontation with the Catholic Church
and the influential role it still plays in Polish
society is a recurring theme in Sasnal’s paintings.
“There are several reasons why I painted an upsidedown church in Untitled (Church2). Firstly, to express
my criticism of the church as an institution; secondly,
I like this modern architecture, especially given
how dull, limited and poor most other architecture
in Poland was before 1989. Thirdly, when I was a teenager I really loved the cover of Slayer’s South of
Heaven (1988), which depicts churches with their crosses upside-down.”
Untitled (After Metinides), 2003
Untitled (After Metinides), the so-called Metinides
paintings, are based on four images by the Mexican
photographer Enrique Metinides, famous for his gruesomely detailed pictures of accidents and deaths.
Nevertheless, Sasnal’s paintings do not depict the
same stories the photographs do since all narrative
elements have been eradicated. Thus, for example, the
image of a young man who hanged himself from a tree
becomes a largely abstract form. “The tree made me think
of a spine, which is how I painted it. This is perhaps
egotistical since the viewer does not know about this.
On the other hand, this was a very particular project
which was a collaboration between the Foksal Gallery
Foundation in Warsaw and the gallery kurimanzutto
in Mexico City, which had invited me to make some paintings after Metinides. [...] In a way, the paintings
were my interpretation of the photographs.”
Room 2
The earliest of the displayed paintings possess a
special significance that makes them assume a central
position in the exhibition. In 2001 Art Spiegelman’s
famous comic book Maus. A Survivor’s Tale (1986) was
published for the first time in Poland. In the blackand-white style of underground comics Spiegelman
tells the story of his father, who survived Auschwitz,
and that of his mother. Spiegelman disguises them in a
fable, in which the protagonists appear in animal form:
the Jews as mice, the Germans as cats, the Americans
as dogs. The late publication of the book in Poland had
to do with the fact that the Poles were portrayed as
pigs, which led to book burnings at a time when the
reappraisal of the Polish collaboration with the Nazis
was still a taboo. Yet, it was drawing as a medium and
the animal metaphors he used that enabled Spiegelman
to tell the story at all: “I need to show the events and
memory of the Holocaust without showing them.”
(Art Spiegelman)
The series with the five Maus paintings possess, above
all, a formal contrast to Sasnal’s other works. “It
was hugely important to me to see this dramatic episode
in human history narrated through a comic book. I began to wonder how much of its content could still be
conveyed by an image taken out of context and without
any speech bubbles.” Sasnal increases the distance to
the story and the real events on which it is based.
By gently questioning the contradictory role the Poles
played as victims and perpetrators in the Second World
War and the Holocaust, Sasnal’s paintings attest to
the continuous effort to position oneself in one’s own
historic present.
A number of Sasnal’s paintings contain cinematic
characteristics and references, which demonstrate
his formal interest in film as a medium. “Regarding
Untitled (Rubber & Metal), I remember seeing on the
news a simulation speculating about the cause of the
Concorde disaster in 2000. A piece of metal lying on
the runway punctured one of the Concorde’s tires
as it was taking off from Charles de Gaulle airport in
Paris, making the aircraft crash two minutes into
its flight. I wanted to paint this simulation. I thought
of comics as drawings evolving in time.”
7
9
Maus 5, 2001
8
Maus 4, 2001
Untitled (Rubber & Metal), 2000
The exhibition shows the development of Sasnal’s work
with a selection of paintings from 2005 to 2011 to the
present. It demonstrates the importance the choice of
models has on the entire process of creating an image.
The semi-abstract form in Masi, for example, was
inspired by the sign of a small shop just around the
corner from where Sasnal and his wife lived. “I wanted
to enlarge this modest sign to lend it a certain monumentality. This was not just a formal game but also had
to do with my wishing to pay tribute to a place which
held a particular significance in my life, as it was
the shop where I first met and then continued to meet my
wife.”
One of the constant objects of investigation in Sasnal’s
work is the examination of seeing and how we experience
the world through perception, especially in view of the
ever rising tide of visual information. A notable
example of this recurring interest is expressed in the
painting Photophobia. “To me, it is very clear what
Photophobia is about. At that time I was painting several works about drunkenness. When I moved to Krakow I
often went to bars. Photophobia captures the hangover,
the first moment when you open your eyes and you hate
light. It expresses a fear of light. [...] I only very
recently painted my first abstract work, a painting
which does not seek to represent anything. In contrast,
Photophobia is completely anchored in reality.”
Room 3
At first glance, the painting Agathe Kanziga Habyarimana
is a portrait of a beautiful young woman. When one
inquires about the woman’s identity, however, one
learns that she and her powerful Hutu family have been
accused of sharing responsibility in the genocide
of the Tutsi minority in Rwanda in 1994. The painting
illustrates how the identification of a person and
his or her biographical information alters the analysis
of a portrait both involuntary and emphatically.
“I was struck by this image when I first saw it in the
newspaper, and by the questions it throws up about
ideology and morality with her being so beautiful and
then again so… I do not know whether one can call it
evil. This is such a difficult category, although I do
not want to relativize such matters. At the same time,
it was quite straightforward to translate this photograph into a painting.”
in. I am suspicious of things that are made like this
[clicks his fingers], hardship is part of the work.
It is not something I fight with. If there were no hardship, my work would be much weaker.“
With Power Plant in Iran (2010) I initially wanted to
paint a particular power plant in Iran based on a
photograph that showed a series of buses in the foreground; but then I did not like the way it looked
because it appeared too specific. You can still see
the traces of the buses that I then changed into
something much more abstract with this white shape
dripping down. It reminded me of radiation. So
the content expanded from a particular, politically
controversial situation, i.e. Iran’s access to nuclear
power, to the much broader issue of radiation, nuclear
energy and the uses to which it is being put.”
The painting Bathers at Asnière is a direct reference
to George Seurat’s eponymous work from 1884. This
painting was Seurat’s first large format representation of life in the suburbs of Paris and depicts a
bathing scene on the north bank of the Seine near the
island Grande Jatte. “There is a particular quality
about the Seurat that I like. I like its melancholy and
the fact that, although it depicts a beautiful day,
everyone is separate. It is as though everybody was on
his own, which makes it seem both depressing and
seductive. At the same time, Seurat’s painting reminds
me of a place along the river where people from my
neighbourhood used to go to relax. It was next to a
large factory, not unlike the buildings you see in
Seurat’s painting. I also associate it with my grandmother’s stories about August and September 1939,
and the hot summer just before World War II, so hot that
people spent their days by the river.”
The model for Pigsty was a pig farm that sets off a
chain of historically charged associations. The
superficially observed, sober representation of this
large building complex is exemplary for the way Sasnal
approaches a subject whose meaning changes or expands
during the process of painting it. “I remember feeling
attracted to these huge long buildings standing close
to one another near my parents. They lived in this
district with high buildings on the outskirts of town
next to these large pig farms. The stench coming from
them when the wind blew from the east was terrible,
everybody complained about it. […] When I was looking
for the right image to paint I found this one, the
biggest one, and my intention was just to paint a huge
but very simple image. I wanted to paint a mundane
subject in the grand tradition of oil painting, just
to paint something which is so simple and so ugly on
a huge scale. I then realised that the sties look
like a camp, and when my father first saw the painting
in my studio, he asked me if I had painted Auschwitz.”
The struggle, the effort of painting, is also a recurring theme in Sasnal’s work. Examples of this are the
four small paintings, Hardship 1 — 4. The first two seem
to be attempts to paint the same motif twice before it
is abstracted. They appear to be both a capitulation to
and a conquering of the problem using different means.
“I always struggle. I find it suspicious when things are
too easy. In Polish there is a term that describes a
certain work ethos, an ethos that I very much believe
The most recent works in the exhibit refer once again
to events of historic proportions, events that shook
and changed the world last year. In Tsunami, which
Sasnal executed immediately after reading a newspaper
article about the devastating catastrophe in Japan,
the artist radically shortens our distance to the
event. He went on the Internet in search of a photograph
of the event and then painted the work. It is the
spontaneous reaction to a tragedy that affected many
individual lives, changing them forever. The tragedy
was the result of unleashed forces of nature and, as
demonstrated shortly thereafter, by the arrogance of
man’s attempting to control an uncontrollable technology. Using his medium, the painter here gives in to
the thoughts and emotions that inevitably arise after
hearing reports of such catastrophes.
15
The rising up of the Libyan people against their dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi culminated in his murder on
October 20, 2011. The painting Gaddafi is based on images
Sasnal found on the Internet that show, among other
things, the dictator’s body laid out on a mattress
located in the middle of a bunker-like room. Sasnal’s
painting depicts the shameless display that served
those present as a scenario for trophy photos. With
this the artist highlights the problematic excess
of a perverted medialization of reality that increasingly manipulates our perception.
Agathe Kanziga Habyarimana, 2010
List of works
Us, 2006
Oil on canvas, 65 × 85 cm
Goetz Collection, Munich
1
Bathers at Asnières, 2010
Oil on canvas, 160 × 120 cm
2
Untitled (After Metinides), 2003
Oil on canvas, 61 × 46 cm
Goetz Collection, Munich
3
Untitled (Church 2), 2001
Oil on canvas, 150 × 135 cm
Neues Museum in Nurnberg, on loan from the Collection of Herbert and Traudl Martin
4
Shoah (Translater), 2003
Oil on canvas, 40 × 50 cm
5
Duel 2, 2002
Oil on canvas, 45 × 60 cm
Collection Martin Hatebur, Switzerland
6
Duel 4, 2002
Oil on canvas, 45 × 55 cm
Rubell Family Collection, Miami
7
Maus 5, 2001
Oil on canvas, 46 × 38 cm
8
Untitled (Rubber & Metal), 2000
Oil on canvas, 150 × 150 cm
Private Collection
9
Maus 4, 2001
Oil on canvas, 115 × 130 cm
10
Masi, 2006
Oil on canvas, 190 × 180 cm
Private Collection, São Paulo
11
Hardship 1 (Anka and Kacper), 2009
Oil on canvas, 40 × 50 cm
Hort Family Collection
12
Hardship 2 (Anka and Kacper), 2009
Oil on canvas, 40 × 50 cm
Hort Family Collection
13
Hardship 3, 2009
Oil on canvas, 55 × 70 cm
Hort Family Collection
14
Hardship 4, 2009
Oil on canvas, 40 × 50 cm
Hort Family Collection
15
Agathe Kanziga Habyarimana, 2010
Oil on canvas, 50 × 40 cm
Collection Leili Huth
16
Tsunami, 2011
Oil on canvas, 55 × 70 cm
17
Power Plant in Iran, 2010
Oil on canvas, 160 × 200 cm
Imprint
This booklet has been published
for the exhibition:
Wilhelm Sasnal
03.02 - 13.05.12
The exhibition is organised by
Whitechapel Gallery, London,
in collaboration with
Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Sponsored by
Roland Berger Strategy Consultants
Supported by Bayerische Hausbau
Polnisches Kulturzentrum, Munich
Publisher: Haus der Kunst Munich
Curator, Text: Dr. Ulrich Wilmes
Translation: Marie Frohling
Visual Concept: BaseDesign
Graphic Desin: Funny Paper
© 2012 Haus der Kunst