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Lot Essay
One of the most celebrated artists to emerge from Eastern Europe in recent years, Wilhelm Sasnal's extraordinarily broad subject matter and stylistic eclecticism stem in part from the sudden overflow of imagery that came with the fall of communism. In Terrorist Equipment, the subject first appears to be a diagrammatic explanation of the kind of concealable body bomb featured in the home-video style terrorist training films transmitted on the daily news, deliberately presented with the impartiality of an airline safety manual. The title of this painting leaves us in no doubt as to it's content and intent, however, using his characteristic palette of black and white, Sasnal discards much of the detail of his source image, belying any notion of verisimilitude. Isolated in the picture plane, the equipment becomes an almost, but not quite, abstracted object. This hovering between painterly abstraction and realism is what lends all of Sasnal's best works a Surreal quality that is hypnotic and seductive.
Wilhelm Sasnal challenges traditional expectations of painterly perception and representation with his unusual sensitivity to the forces at play in the world. The subjects of his voracious eye range from such arbitary everyday items as spools of magnetic tape, travel postcards and album covers to novels, images from the daily news and history books, which he combines in such a way that he has created a visual vocabulary where the public and the personal coincide. His style often ironically and sometimes reverentially nods to almost every artist in the 20th century canon of art history, defying any categorization by altering his method and compositions so that it becomes hard to identify the same artistic hand behind any given group of his works. He mixes photorealism with expressionistic splashes of paint and free hand drawings in darkly comic arrangements and often with a knowing smile - in today's hungry market the essence of 'success' as an artist is to have an identifiable, easily recognisable style. Sasnal's aesthetic not only eschews but forbids any such approach to his art.
Wilhelm Sasnal challenges traditional expectations of painterly perception and representation with his unusual sensitivity to the forces at play in the world. The subjects of his voracious eye range from such arbitary everyday items as spools of magnetic tape, travel postcards and album covers to novels, images from the daily news and history books, which he combines in such a way that he has created a visual vocabulary where the public and the personal coincide. His style often ironically and sometimes reverentially nods to almost every artist in the 20th century canon of art history, defying any categorization by altering his method and compositions so that it becomes hard to identify the same artistic hand behind any given group of his works. He mixes photorealism with expressionistic splashes of paint and free hand drawings in darkly comic arrangements and often with a knowing smile - in today's hungry market the essence of 'success' as an artist is to have an identifiable, easily recognisable style. Sasnal's aesthetic not only eschews but forbids any such approach to his art.