Wilhelm Sasnal, "Kodak Dead Black", 2012. Courtesy of Anton Kern Gallery
For his fifth solo exhibition at the Anton Kern Gallery, Sasnal creates a study of "picture-taking" and "picture-making", inspired by the legacy of George Eastman and his Kodak empire
Since the beginning of his career, Wilhelm Sasnal has used his art to reference other forms of art and media, from sketches, comic books and films to photographs of everyday life. Just as film reproduces nature, the artist has made a name for himself reformulating reality according to his vision of the world. Every work is a "singular event" for Sasnal, and while some appear as straightforward renditions of everyday objects, his portraits and landscapes, full of intimacy and languidness, slow the pace of life. As he has said, Sasnal sees no boundary between that which is public and that which is private.
The artist takes his cue from the "Kodak moment" and the culture of capturing evanescent points in time that, in turn, become endowed with additional significance for those connected with the particular situation or event. He takes into consideration film's material nature and its potential to transform an image, along with symbolism and subconscious qualities of the picture-taking act and meanings within the resulting image. Exhibited works range from literal depictions of a box of film to subjective images - "Kodak moments".
Steve Pulimood likened Sasnal's approach to photography and film to that of human memory and its fallibility, in the Summer 2010 issue of Art Review. "For an artist who paints from photographs and who is also a filmmaker in his own right", Pulimood remarked, "Sasnal's interest in the indirectness of vision and his emphasis on painting optical aberrations is fascinating".
According to gallery curators, Sasnal uses his skills of analytic observation and intuition in his latest show to create images that are
delicate and precise, yet also singularly striking reflections on the nature of personal and collective memory. Sasnal’s paintings capture the fleeting moment twofold, once as a moment brought to a halt, quite like a photograph, and secondly as an unraveling of sub-conscious layers of meaning and history, quite beyond the capability of photography.
Wilhelm Sasnal (born 1971 in Tanów) is considered by critics to be a leading painter of his generation. His works underline the personal attachment and emotional relationship he has to the the world around him. His main areas of interest are limits and possibilities of representation, and examining the process of seeing and perceiving. From "pop-banal" works of his early days to more intimate series including Hardship (2009) and Father (2012), Sasnal is acknowledged as a chronicler of contemporaneity. In addition to painting, illustration and graphic art, he is a video artist and filmmaker whose minimalist style carries great emotion, both positive and negative.
Sasnal is represented by the Anton Kern Gallery in the U.S. and has had four solo exhibitions there since 2003. He took part in the gallery's 10th-anniversary group show in 2006 and the Friends and Family group show in 2008.
Wilhelm Sasnal's current show takes place from the 22nd of February - 6th of April 2012. For more information, see: www.antonkerngallery.com
Author: Agnieszka Le Nart
Source: Press release, Art Review, own sources