H a u s der k u n s t

Wilhelm s a s n a l

s t r e t c H y o u r V i e W

Haus der KunstPrinzregentenstraße 180538 Munich+49 89 21127 113mail @ hausderkunst.dewww.hausderkunst.de

Opening hours Haus der Kunst:Mo - Su 10 am - 8 pm / Thurs 10 am - 10 pmOpening hours Sammlung Goetz at Haus der Kunst: Fr - Su 10 am - 8 pm

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 contem-porary visual languages. In this age of information overload through photographic images, Sasnal’s pain- tings 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.

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 por-traits 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 his-torical styles of painting with the same implicitness: he blends romantic atmosphere with cool realism and ironic pop, whereby he playfully overcomes the tradi-tional distinctions between abstraction and repre- sentation. 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

title, but often the specifics are only known to the artist. This is not to enlist us in a game of hide- and-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 anticipa-tion.”

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 presen-tation 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.

Bathers at asnières, 2010

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“Painting is not a game, not something you do just for fun; it comes with a responsibility that i take very seriously.”

Wilhelm s a s n a l

ro o m 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.” 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 spon-taneous reaction to the impression an image leaves on him, although it is immaterial to him whether the image is a document of contemporary historical sig-nificance 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 upside- down 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 teen- ager I really loved the cover of Slayer’s South of Heaven (1988), which depicts churches with their cros-ses upside-down.”

Untitled (After Metinides), the so-called Metinides paintings, are based on four images by the Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides, famous for his gru-esomely 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 pain-tings after Metinides. [...] In a way, the paintings were my interpretation of the photographs.”

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untitled (after Metinides), 2003

ro o m 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 black-and-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 be- gan 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.”

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 monu-mentality. 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 seve-ral 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.”

Maus 5, 2001

Maus 4, 2001

untitled (rubber & Metal), 2000

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ro o m 3At 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 photo-graph into a painting.”

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 representa- tion 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 grand- mother’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 struggle, the effort of painting, is also a recur-ring 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

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 hard-ship, 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 fore-ground; 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 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 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 tech-nology. Using his medium, the painter here gives in to the thoughts and emotions that inevitably arise after hearing reports of such catastrophes.

The rising up of the Libyan people against their dicta-tor 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 increa-singly manipulates our perception.

agathe kanziga Habyarimana, 2010

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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

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