Wilhelm Sasnal

Wilhelm Sasnal (Tarnów, 29 de diciembre de 1972) es un artista polaco.

Estudió pintura en la Academia de Bellas Artes de Cracovia, donde se graduó en 1999. En 1996 había fundado, junto con otros artistas, un grupo al que llamaron «Ladnie», con el que buscaban alejarse de los postulados academicistas y conseguir la atención del público y de los galeristas, pero Sasnal pronto abandonó tal grupo, que acabó disolviéndose. En el año 2006, Wilhelm Sasnal ganó con tres obras cinematográficas el Premio Bienal para el Arte Contemporáneo Vincent van Gogh.1


Sasnal produces pencil drawings, ink drawings, photographs, videos and paintings. In his art he employs a variety of media and cultivates a non-uniform practice.

Sasnal is primarily a painter. There are no limits to what he paints: More or less banal everyday objects, portraits of historical figures, views of his home town Cracow, snapshots of friends and family members and very often existing images from the internet or mass media are his starting point. Even if, over the years, one can make out a number of overarching themes, there are always new paintings that shift the emphases and connections once again. The same is true of his painting style. His approach is unpredictable and his methods range from graphic reduction and a pointedly two-dimensional, illustration-oriented style to seemingly autonomous gestures with brush and paint. Like Neo Rauch, however, Sasnal makes the grip of the Communist era on the post-Communist imagination his subject.




While painting is still at the centre of Sasnal’s work, he has also increasingly turned to photography and film in recent years. The video work The Band (2002) was made during a live performance of indie rock band Sonic Youth. A 2007 piece is a product many times removed from the 1961 Polish movie on which it is based – a fictionalized account of a historical event in which a railway worker accidentally sold industrial methyl alcohol as vodka, causing widespread illness, blindness and death. The 16-mm film projection Untitled (2007) is based on found-footage from the late 1970s of Elvis Presley. Swiniopas (Swineherd) (2008), his first ever feature-length film, is an adaptation of a 1842 Hans Christian Andersen fairytale of the same name yet radically deviates from the original. Shot in black and white, Sasnal’s version is set in bleak, rural Poland. It concerns a swineherd who smuggles letters back and forth between a farmer’s daughter and her lesbian lover. Also in 2008, Sasnal caused controversy in Scotland with his film The Other Church, which focused on the brutal murder of the Polish student Angelika Kluk in Glasgow.