(born 1972 in Tarnów, lives and works in Krakow, Poland)
Untitled (crossroads), 2000, signed Wilhelm Sasnal on the overlap, oil on canvas, two canvases horizontally pieced together, 191 x 188.5 cm, on stretcher

Provenance:
Foksal Gallery, Warsaw –
acquired from the above by the present owner in 2001

With a minimal symbolic modelling of the three-dimensional body and strongly contrasting colours, Wilhelm Sasnal expertly places his motifs on the canvas. In the present work, his schematic representation of a motorway intersection has the effect, on the one hand, of a complex organic ornament, and, on the other hand, of the condensation of daily experiences of landscape. Thereby the artist engages in a precise play with the visible and what it can signify as an echo of personal memories or of contemporary events. The increasing motorisation and building-up of the environment, according to the mood of the viewer, admits both positive associations, such as the promise of freedom or prosperity, and oppressive interpretations, such as a general lack of direction and orientation in the grid of possible ramifications.

Untitled (crossroads) was created just before the young artist, born in 1972, attracted great international attention with his first exhibitions, for example in the Foksal Gallery, Warsaw (2001), in the Kunsthalle Basel (2002), as well as in the Kunsthalle Zurich and in the Westphalian Kunstverein Münster (2003). At around the turn of the millennium, the focus of his painting, derived from photography and other images, lay on daily life in Poland. In retrospect, his paintings seemed like a sort of inventory of his surroundings. Nevertheless, already in these early paintings Sasnal revealed an unusual ability to isolate a moment or a situation out of its context, in order to create a particular tension both formally and in terms of content. The art historian Ulrich Loock has fittingly described this artistic strategy:

“For Sasnal, painting is a medium for registering individual objects that are removed from their corresponding situational contexts without resulting in any uncertainty about their nature and use. The various motifs are unified artistically according to a method that corresponds to the process of naming in the domain of language. Sasnal’s painting in this period is about not reproducing the visual appearance of things, but affirming the possibility of designating them.”
Ulrich Loock, “Sasnal’s Nominalism”, in: Carina Plath, Beatrix Ruf (eds.), Wilhelm Sasnal. Night Day Night, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Zurich, 2003, page 101