Born in 1972 in Tarnow, Poland, Wilhelm Sasnal lives and works in Kraków. Primarily using painting and film, Sasnal engages with the contemporary crisis of representation from the particular vantage point of post-communist Poland, which was suddenly flooded with an endless stream of market-driven imagery from the West. In response to both his immediate surroundings and global visual culture at large, Sasnal depicts a diverse range of subjects, including portraits, landscapes, architecture, mass-produced objects and propagandist icons using a variety of stylistic approaches, as a means of reducing technique and genre to a level playing field. Influenced by music and history, Sasnal samples his subject matter from a range of sources both direct and mediated, thus creating a personal archive of imagery, at once autobiographical and suggestive of our elusive contemporary moment.
