T-ów: Wilhelm Sasnal

Anton Kern Gallery is proud to present T- ów, the first solo show of Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal in New York.

Wilhelm Sasnal’s painting underscores the gaps between reality and representation, memory and fantasy, solidity and intangibility. His work presents a queasy palette akin to the off-kilter print quality of a trashy fanzine. In all of Sasnal's paintings the motif is derived from a preexisting picture - the memory of a photograph - rather than from an empirical or even imagined source. Figuration and abstraction hold equal footing with the viscosity and delivery of paint in Sasnal’s canvases. This constant shift in technique and style evades easy categorization and permits the artist, and viewers, to take pleasure in its variety.

Sasnal embraces an easy relationship to the mediated image. By drawing upon cinematic conventions through a reliance on photography, the artist cultivates an unsettling sensation of detachment in his paintings. For this show Sasnal selected a graphic image, the abbreviation of his hometown in Poland, for the invitation card. Throughout his work graphic and image are not juxtaposed but intertwined. Sasnal poaches a myriad of westernized topographies, thereby allowing the appropriated image to mold the praxis of his painting.