Wilhelm Sasnal

Wilhelm Sasnal (b.1972, Tarnow, Poland) is one of the most exciting artists to emerge from Eastern Europe in the past decade. His practice encompasses drawing, film, comics and, above all, painting. Prolific, varied and deliberately unclassifiable, his work captures the enigma of our contemporary image-based culture. Since the beginning, Sasnal has approached the world around him as a stockpile of imagery that he can draw on for subject matter. What links all of these images, however, is the tension between abstraction and representation, between illusionism and the abrupt materiality of paint itself. In Sasnal's paintings, matter and image swap places, crossing and recrossing the border between depiction and abstraction, often several times in a single canvas. In parallel to Sansnal's painting practice is his filmmaking. In 2001 he picked up his first 8 mm camera, and recently he premiered his first full-length 35 mm film, Fallout (2010). His work in every medium involves a process of absorbing, saturating, materializing and then moving on to the next subject. And the imagery in his films is every bit as mysterious and seductive as that in his paintings, sharing Sasnal's commitment to translating the distance between lived experience and the imagery that mediates it. By gathering images from a wide range of sources and placing them on an equal plane, Sasnal creates an encylopaedic view of the visual world around him, centred around his ongoing fascination with the possibilities and limits of representation. It is this encyclopaedic eye, and his beguiling facility with his medium, that has made him one of the most captivating artists working today.