| Wilhelm Sasnal 2007March 8, 2007- April 14, 2007
Wilhelm Sasnal’s third solo exhibition at Anton
Kern Gallery consists of a 16 mm film projection, a set of posters
(ink on paper), and a group of paintings. All works are held
together by the theme of intoxication, which is introduced through
the film’s narrative, structure, and atmosphere.
Sasnal’s film is, itself, based on an early 1960s Polish movie
depicting—in fictionalized form—a historic event in which the
protagonist finds gallons of industrial methyl alcohol, sells it as
vodka and thereby causes widespread illness, blindness, and death. Sasnal, however, is not out to
romanticize or vilify the effects of alcohol, or to describe the place of alcohol in the poetic mind. Rather,
by creating a distanced, in fact twice removed relationship between the viewer and the events unfolding
on screen (of a nation under the influence), his interest lies in the relationship between the appearance
of the film images, the paintings and the relating (historical and current) social and political events. It is
the metaphor of alcohol that Sasnal uses as a template to engage with history and memory in general,
to start a conversation between past and present in a non-nostalgic and radical way. In motifs such as a
faceless man tormented by a hang-over headache, or a disorienting perspectival view inside a cubic
structure, or a look into the blinding sun from behind silhouetted grain, Sasnal formulates precise image
ideas and transforms them—with a visual clarity reminiscent of poster art—into paintings that capture
the uncertainty of life.
Sasnal’s work has recently been presented in one-person shows at the Van Abbemuseum in
Eindhoven, the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt, the Douglas Hyde Gallery at Trinity College in
Dublin (all 2006), and the MATRIX gallery at the Berkeley Art Museum (2005). His work has also been
included in group exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where he won the 2006 Vincent
Van Gogh Biennial Award for Contemporary Art, the National Museum of Art in Osaka, the Museu
Serralves in Porto, the Sculpture Center in New York (all 2006), the Saatchi Collection, London (2005),
and the Biennale de Sao Paulo (2004).
Reviews of Wilhelm Sasnal 2007New York Times
April 6, 2007 | | Roberta Smith | | "Like the Leipzig painter Neo Rauch, Mr. Sasnal makes the grip of the Communist era on the post-Communist imagination his subject. But while Mr. Rauch seems energized to the point of manic excess, Mr. Sasnal seems locked in some kind of pictorial post-traumatic stress syndrome. Genuine as it may be, it doesn’t give the viewer enough to work with...." |
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