Wilhelm Sasnal Sunspots

200×200cm. Oil on canvas. Unique 2008

Born in 1972 in Tarnów, Poland, Wilhelm Sasnal is among a new generation of contemporary artists who emerged following the country's transition from Communist to democratic rule in 1989. He is best known for making paintings that combine elements of representation and abstraction to depict images based on photographs that he takes himself or that he finds in other sources ranging from books to films and websites. As such, these paintings maintain a delicate balance between personal intimacy and distanced irony. Common subjects for Sasnal include his own family and experiences as well as the history of Poland and the role the country played in the Holocaust during World War II. At other times he “documents” the landscape around Tarnów where he was raised, often using expressive brushstrokes to communicate atmosphere through minimalist gestures, or he will obliterate key details from his source images, as with the painting Untitled (After Metinides) (2003), which blurs behind a flurry of monochrome hues everything but some figures loitering in the background of an airplane crash site that had been photographed by the Mexican photojournalist Enrique Metinides. (Excerpted from ART iT's interview with Wilhelm Sasnal.) Sasnal has received increased recognition from around the year 2000 as a young painter representing Poland and Eastern Europe. His works are included in many museum collections in Europe and the United States, including Tate Modern. As expressed in the title, Sunspots is a large painting made in 2007, a two-meter square canvas with a white underpainting and two sunspots painted in black.