Wilhelm Sasnal A German Artist at The Saatchi Gallery

Wilhelm Sasnal makes paintings in response to the abundance of imagery that emerged in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. No two Sasnal paintings ever look alike: he makes pop paintings, naturalistic paintings and abstracts. Some of his works look like still lifes, others like street scenes or record labels. Sasnal has even been known to make paintings about nothing at all: a roll of tape, a computer disk or a plant.Sasnal draws his subject matter from day-to-day reality. The most banal examples of still life mingle with commensurate importance to propaganda icons, advertising and photojournalistic imagery. Wilhelm Sasnal approaches image production as a formal exercise, ranging from abstract to figurative with schizophrenic adaptation of style and technique. Through making, he renders all things equal.Wilhelm Sasnal's practice doesn't celebrate freedom, but a shift in conformity. It strives to define personal experience of an impersonal world. Through his painting, he explores a no man's land where private and public converge in a sluice of shared memory. Operating as his own self-sustaining information source, Wilhelm Sasnal imposes his world order on politics, celebrity, art history and banality, quietly developing a position of individual conscience.
Wilhelm Sasnal is an artist who consistently manifests an unusual sensitivity to the reality that surrounds us. His works are exquisite comments to the imagery we face in the artistic and political realms. His paintings seem to ask a key question about the emotions that are elicited by images (in the realms of photography, film and painting) in our private and public lives. The artist's subjects have included spools of magnetic tape, wall sockets, supermarket and travel office leaflets, the covers of well-known record albums, photographs from geographical albums, a vacation postcard, and a painting by Jerzy Nowosielski. Sasnal's painting of a computer diskette is Poland's "black square on a white field" of the 1990s.Wilhelm Sasnal approaches painting as a formal exercise. He often borrows subjects from art history, 20th century propaganda, and photojournalism. Airplanes is a dark appropriation of Alighiero Boetti's famous airplane drawings. Subverting the original pastoral optimism, Wilhelm Sasnal's planes are engulfed in smoke as if they've been hit by enemy fire.Wilhelm Sasnal deconstructs the hierarchy of 'high culture' by filtering it through mass-media association. Through painting, Sasnal explores his own interpretation and understanding of imagery. His work constantly questions the space between ‘personal' and ‘public', and strives to define individual experience within a world order of collective consciousness.

Find more about Wilhelm Sasnal paintings, biography, solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and resource of Wilhelm Sasnal artist. View Wilhelm Sasnal artwork online at The Saatchi Gallery - London contemporary art gallery.Wilhelm Sasnal