Wilhelm Sasnal makes paintings in response to the abundance of imagery that emerged in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. No two Sasnal paintings ever look alike: he makes pop paintings, naturalistic paintings and abstracts. Some of his works look like still lifes, others like street scenes or record labels. Sasnal has even been known to make paintings about nothing at all: a roll of tape, a computer disk or a plant.



Wilhelm Sasnal is one of the most celebrated artists to emerge from Eastern Europe in recent years. Working from his home country Poland, he uses painting as a means to intimately negotiate his position within (new) capitalist culture. Sasnal's work is prolific, varied and deliberately unclassifiable as a strategy: digesting his practice is akin to swallowing mass media whole. Wilhelm Sasnal, painting is imperative as a means of challenging traditional expectations of representation and perception. Through his intervention, subject matter becomes distorted: images are pared down to the bare essentials and estranged from their original context or meaning.

Wilhelm Sasnal's practice doesn't celebrate freedom, but a shift in conformity. It strives to define personal experience of an impersonal world. Through his painting, he explores a no man's land where private and public converge in a sluice of shared memory. Operating as his own self-sustaining information source, Wilhelm Sasnal imposes his world order on politics, celebrity, art history and banality, quietly developing a position of individual conscience.Wilhelm Sasnal's portraits of women explore modern concepts of beauty and representation. The pop star Peaches is given a degenerate Warhol glam; Anka, the alabaster sophistication of Katz. Dominika, painted in greyscale, has the allure of outdated photography suggestive of distinctively Eastern European chic.Wilhelm Sasnal approaches feminine idealism as a construct of fashion. It's not the physicality of the women themselves, but rather the style with which they're represented. Each rendered in a manner associated with a specific time and place, Wilhelm Sasnal's portraits aren't classical icons, but models defined by their own sell-by dates. All pictured smoking a cigarette, Sasnal alludes to the slow self-destruction of their beauty.