Sasnal's picture production sets itself apart from painting's relationship with photography, which art history has made into a problem, to as great an extent as it has distanced itself from critical discourse about the world being open to media manipulation.
PRESS PREVIEW: FRIDAY, 22 AUGUST, 11.30 a.m.
OPENING: FRIDAY, 22 AUGUST, FROM 6 p.m.
Wilhelm Sasnal was born in Tarnów in 1972. He studied painting and
architecture in nearby Krakow, and now lives and works in his birthplace
again. He has made a name for himself in recent years, particularly with
numerous group exhibitions on the theme of contemporary paining, and in the
context of a revived interest in realism in painting.
His work has been seen in exhibitions including Urgent Painting, ARC Paris,
2002, Painting on the Move, Kunsthalle Basel, 2002, and as an insert in the
collection holdings at MUHKA, Antwerp, 2003. The exhibition in the
Kunsthalle Zürich is the Polish artist's first one-man show in any
institution. It includes over 60 paintings, works on paper and films from
the period 1999 to 2003.
Taking the opportunity to look at a CD archive of Wilhelm Sasnal's work in
recent years, you are overwhelmed by the sheer mass and stylistic breadth of
his pictures. He has made over 700 paintings since 1999, and at the same
time as this, an enormous number of pen and ink drawings, photographs and
film. The sheer quantity of his artistic output suggests that the Polish
artist cannot be interested in reviving painting as a medium of auratically
charged authenticity and the rare original. And stylistically as well, his
work has a breadth that transcends periods and media: Pop, photorealism,
abstraction, minimalism, gestural painting, works with ruled lines,
documentary material, surrealism etc.
Despite all this, he seems to be most interested in the two-dimensional
image at present, executed in paint on canvas, and perhaps finds it the most
practicable for his artistic production.
Wilhelm Sasnal «paints» from reality, that is from a reality shaped by the
omnipresent reality of images as conveyed by the media and by the continuum
of reality - fiction - image that this causes to be present.
He uses the compositional patterns of these pictures that shape our
perception of reality, and thus first generate our reality: pictures of
press reports on disasters, like photographs of the Boeing exploding over
Lockerbie, car crashes, aeroplanes bursting into flames on take-off, atomic
bombs exploding, but also sports reports; he moves along the layouts of
specific magazine types or books on particular subjects: hunting magazines,
books about the moon landing or UFOs, books on the flora and fauna of Poland
or the animal world in general - monkeys, colour, fungi, parasitesÅ His own
photographs, like portraits of friends or pictures of everyday objects, the
consumer world or pornography find their way into his work as much as works
by the photographer Rodchenko or art catalogues, like for example the cover
of an Alex Katz catalogue, landscape from catalogues of the Land Artist
Robert Smithson, Smithson himself or Beuys in Poland. But also politicians,
writers and their work, directors and their films, musicians from well-known
groups and their album covers become his pictures: Sonic Youth, Stereolab,
The Clash, Einstürzende Neubauten, the films Shoah, Duel and much else.
Current political themes, like the reappraisal of the treatment of Poland
Jewish population during the Second World War, which has a markedly
anti-Semitic feel to it, Sasnal addresses in an analysis of Art Spiegelman's
comic books, and his own biographical sphere might perhaps be approached
through pictures of churches and book covers from Polish publications in the
60s and 70s. Wilhelm Sasnal paints these «things» as he comes across them.
His paintings look like the enlarged black-and-white graphics of a comic
drawing or like photo-realistic translation of a photograph into the medium
of painting, painted meticulously, and in a masterly fashion. But he can
also operate with pop-like form and colour compositions, evoke sentimentally
atmospheric colour mood, use gesturally emotionalised paint application for
abstract purposes or cite details from pictures, or cropping as
characteristics of a view of images that is already abstracted in
compositional terms.
Sasnal's images register reality across the board, from the fridge at home
to the atomic threat. They are complex appropriations, both physically and
psychologically. The source, and thus the primary media and culture images,
are present, without guaranteeing unambiguous and uniform access to the
pictorial content of his paintings, which is broken, exposed, held back and
released as something to the defined anew. The familiar language of media
and art-historical building material that we meet in Wilhelm Sasnal's images
refuses familiar interpretations and creates a space for disturbance that
that can sometimes make the paintings seem threatening.
His pictures are objects that have got rid of formally varied, multiply
overlapping planes of interpretation of media-conveyed reality, which is
addressed and criticized with equal diversity. They refuse both the known
aspect of the images themselves and the known aspect of an apparently
objectified and critical set of systems for approaching them.
They set an apparently «more apolitical» but therefore all the more direct
subjective interrogation against the media criticism we use to confront all
images, which has become a commonplace and thus somewhat thin as an
instrument for critical analysis. Sasnal's picture production sets itself
apart from painting's relationship with photography, which art history has
made into a problem, to as great an extent as it has distanced itself from
critical discourse about the world being open to media manipulation: Wilhelm
Sasnal has «based» his perceptions on the media surface of our world, in no
hierarchy to the terms of the apparently more real elements of our own
reality. Criticism and meaning are generated in his pictures precisely
through the equally weighted approach of a subject to all planes of our
reality.
In his pictures, what we find above all is seeing as active reality
production - both the artist's seeing and seeing in the experience of the
images themselves. They offer a presence of reality, and thus perhaps make
this available as reality again.
Wilhelm Sasnal catalogue
Publ. by Kunsthalle Zürich, Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster, 148 pages,
numerous illustrations. Essays: Interview Andrzej Pzywara - Wilhelm Sasnal,
Ulrich Loock, Carina Plath, Beatrix Ruf et al. Published mid September 2003
Concert: Friday, 5 September, 8.30 p.m.
«ensemble für neue musik zürich» plays: The Music of George Crumb (b.1929)
Sonata, Four Madrigals, Vox Balaenae (Voice of the whale), 11 Echoes of
Autumn (Echoes II), Dream Sequence (Images II)
With Hans-Peter Frehner, Hansruedi Bissegger, Johanna Baer, Viktor Müller,
Lorenz Haas, Urs Bumbacher, Stefan Thut, Käthi Steuri and Barbara Böhi
Matt Mullican, Hypnosis Performance: Monday, 22 September, 7 p.m.
Matt Mullican's (1951) internationally acclaimed work uses a wide variety of
expressive devices to examine the relationships between image, meaning and
physical reality. Mullican has devised a complex vocabulary of signs and
images representing a kind of cosmological system, which he uses to examine
the function of signs in relation to psychological and thus cultural
perception modes. He has also used performances for his investigations since
the seventies, and performance under hypnosis in particular, For these,
Mullican creates special rooms, which he calls «psycho-architectures«. For
Mullican, hypnosis is a tool, with which he can gain access to imaginative
structures, , and also a tool for «fictionalising» his person. The artist
only rarely uses these hypnosis performances; they function as experiments
that drive specific themes of his work further.
Symposium: Saturday/Sunday, 1./ 2 November
Working in close co-operation with Wilhelm Sasnal and Pro Helvetia in Krakow
we are devising an event that can shed light on themes in the artist's work
like literature, music, politics and relations with reality from the point
of view of Polish and international experts. Here we are particularly
interested in how a concept of the real can be created in the various
cultural contexts out of the wide range of media influences today
Detailed information can be downloaded from October from the web site
Public guided tours: Always on Thursday at 6.30 p.m. with Medea Hoch: 4.9. /
18.9. / 2.10. and 23.10.
Opening times: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday 12 p.m. Â 6 p.m., Saturday,
Sunday, public holidays 11 a.m. Â 5 p.m. Closed Monday. EVENING OPENING:
Thursday 12 p.m. Â 8 p.m.
The Kunsthalle thanks: Präsidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich, Pro Helvetia
Krakow
Kunsthalle Zurich
Limmatstrasse 270 8005 Zurich
tel 01 2721515