Exhibition: William Sasnal in Munich's Haus der Kunst

The Haus der Kunst in Munich presents an exhibition on the works of Wilhelm Sasnal.

Tsunami Girl (2011)
From 03.02. 13/05/2012 to present the Haus der Kunst in Munich, an exhibition on the art of the Polish painter Wilhelm Sasnal. The exhibition gives an insight into Sasnal's work from 1999 to the present day and shows in addition to 60 paintings and a selection of his films.

Wilhelm Sasnal was born in 1972 in Tarnow (Poland) and was already making internationally through a series of solo exhibitions attention. He finds his subjects in everyday life and in the media. It reaches its imagery of portraits of his relatives and friends to become icons of pop culture, the news photo of a young girl in the rubble of the tsunami disaster in Japan to the chapters of Polish history as the Second World War, including the Holocaust. Like a pendulum swinging his images constantly between past and present, back and forth. Sasnal stylistically blends realism and romance with pop work with abstraction. Altogether his works occupy a passion for the history of painting and a conceptual discussion of the painting as a medium.

Wilhelm Sasnal selects from the mass of images in comic books, newspapers, television and the Internet which are otherwise easily overlooked, and creates a unique and very personal documentary of contemporary life.

Sasnal enjoyed his training at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts. There he found the making of still life, deeds and restrictions on art history until the beginning of the 20th Century he was living far away "very technical" and "My life was completely different than what the pictures show, which I should refer, so I wanted to paint what was going on around me."

The years 2000/2001 were crucial for Wilhelm Sasnal: in Poland appeared to Art Spiegelman's graphic novel "Maus" and Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour documentary "Shoah" (1985) has been shown and Jan Tomasz Gross's book "Neighbours" (2001) came out. After the Poles had been seen exclusively as victims of the Nazis, these publications are now themed their involvement or participation in the atrocities. Wilhelm Sasnal found this necessity of changing perspective initially disturbing. In 2001 he painted five paintings after the comic book "Maus," Art Spiegelman in which the Nazis as cats, the Jews as mice, Poles as pigs, and represents the Americans as dogs.