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There’s a lot to learn from this mid-career survey of paintings and films by Wilhelm Sasnal. Not least, the Polish artist’s importance to the development of painting after Gerhard Richter (who currently has a retrospective at Tate Modern), but also how surprisingly little we know of him. However, this sense of a limited view of Sasnal works in the exhibition’s favour, for one can’t help but be impressed by the sheer skill and versatility of the artist’s practice, beyond a characteristically minimal, slickly graphic approach to the job of deconstructing media images.
The ground-floor gallery display (works from 2005-11) erases most preconceptions, appearing to catalogue almost every painterly permutation between the abstract composition and impressionist homage. A couple kiss with a conjoined, materially unstable ferocity, a young figure appears bleached – familial yet oddly messianic – in a ’70s album cover twilight. Richter’s influence, as the great painter of the mediated image, is present (in the smudged face of Roy Orbison, for example) but no more so than Andy Warhol, Luc Tuymans and other figures from the canon, as grouped in the Hayward’s ‘Painting of Modern Life’ exhibition of 2008.
The upper galleries give space to Sasnal’s personal themes, notably his native Krakow and the significance of the city during World War II. Among his spare rearticulations of Nazi motifs from Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust cartoon series, ‘Maus’, news images of athletes’ heads bob into canvas view like grey human balloons. The short films shown here provide significant insight into Sasnal’s compulsion to deal with the images of his time. Not only is his fascination with the shifting sands of remembered events but with the technological reduction of places and people to coloured atoms – connecting the iconic and ordinary, alike.