Wilhelm Sasnal exhibits

Polish art lovers have until March 2 to see work by the most promising artist of the younger generation, William Sasnal.

His exhibition, which opened Nov. 27 in Zacheta National Gallery of Art, is titled “Years of Struggle” and presents works created over the last few years, including paintings, portraits, films and so-called music paintings ? attempts at capturing music in its visual form.

Sasnal is the most popular young Polish artist of our time. Born in 1972, he has already become an icon of Polish art, his works selling for enormous sums on international auctions and prestigious awards coming his way. He received the Vincent van Gogh award, the most important European artistic award, in 2006.

In the 1990s he was a member of an artistic group Ladnie, which he created with Marcin Maciejowski and Rafal Bujnowski. However, his painting has evolved quite far from his early artistic enterprise.
Sasnal is not only a painter. Other means of expression such as film and photography are equally important to him.

His films are produced in a traditional way, by use of 8 and 12 mm tape, and so presented. A room is devoted to them in the Zacheta exhibition.

Sasnal’s works are inspired by various events, contexts, times and places, presented symbolically in his creations. The themes displayed in the Zacheta exhibition include, for instance, World War II and the Holocaust, the life of the postwar People’s Republic of Poland, as well as trivial aspects of contemporary reality and some autobiographical elements. Many of the works will be shown in Poland for the first time.