Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, it’s high time we talked about Wilhelm Sasnal, born in 1972 in Tarnów, Poland, an artist who has been keeping us on edge for over twenty years with his works that constantly oscillate between the sublime and the banal, between grand history and the most trivial of everyday life. He is not just a painter who mechanically reproduces images gathered here and there. No, Sasnal is a meticulous observer of our time, an obsessive visual archivist who dissects our relationship with images with surgical precision.
The first striking feature of his work is his unique way of transforming seemingly banal images into genuine visual manifestos. Take, for example, his series on Polish churches painted upside down, like “Kirche” (2001). These paintings are not mere formal exercises; they perfectly embody what Friedrich Nietzsche called the “transvaluation of values”. In a post-communist Poland where the Catholic Church continues to wield significant influence over daily life, Sasnal forces us to view these religious symbols from a literally inverted perspective. These overturned churches become powerful metaphors for our ambiguous relationship with the sacred in a desacralized world. And don’t think for a second that it’s gratuitous or provocative—every brushstroke is calculated to make us reflect on our complex relationship with religious institutions and their symbolic power.
But wait, this is just the tip of the iceberg. What makes Sasnal’s work truly fascinating is his ability to intertwine personal and collective history. He doesn’t paint History with a capital H in a didactic or moralizing way. No, he makes it emerge in the most trivial details, as in his paintings inspired by Art Spiegelman’s comic book “Maus”. In 2001, when he appropriated these images, it wasn’t to offer yet another representation of the Holocaust but to question how this tragedy continues to haunt our present. Walter Benjamin spoke of “history against the grain”—this is exactly what Sasnal does: he scratches the smooth surface of our present to reveal the scars of the past that persist beneath our collective consciousness. These works are not mere citations or appropriations; they are acts of resistance against oblivion, against the temptation to turn the page too quickly on the darker chapters of our history.
Sasnal’s pictorial technique is as revealing as his subjects. He handles paint like a DJ mixes samples: sometimes with clinical photographic precision, sometimes with unbridled expressionist gestures. This approach is reminiscent of what Roland Barthes called the “pleasure of the text”—except here, it’s the pleasure of the image that’s at play. Sasnal constantly toys with our visual expectations, creating paintings that seem familiar at first glance but become strangely unsettling the longer we contemplate them. His often limited color palette is not a superficial aesthetic choice but a profound conceptual decision. The grays, browns, and blacks that dominate his canvases are not there to look pretty but to remind us of the very materiality of painting, its ability to transform reality into something more ambiguous, more disturbing.
And let’s talk about this ambiguity. Take his political portraits, like those of Marine Le Pen (2012) or Angela Merkel (2016). These are not mere representations of public figures but profound psychological studies on power and its media image. Sasnal paints them as specters, ghostly apparitions haunting our contemporary political landscape. These portraits echo what Michel Foucault described as “pastoral power”—a form of governance that claims to care for its flock while exerting absolute control over it. Every brushstroke is a political analysis; every shade of color is a commentary on the nature of power in our media-saturated society.
In his views of Tarnów, his hometown, or his paintings of industrial sites like the Azoty factories, Sasnal transforms ordinary places into almost apocalyptic scenes. These landscapes are reminiscent of what Jean-François Lyotard called the “contemporary sublime”—that dizzying sensation in the face of the technological and industrial vastness surrounding us. But unlike the Romantics, who sought the sublime in untamed nature, Sasnal finds it in urban peripheries, abandoned industrial zones, the non-places of late modernity. He paints these spaces with particular attention to the details that reveal their history: the traces of wear, the marks of time, the scars left by human activity. These landscapes are silent witnesses to the brutal transformation of post-communist Poland, but they also serve as broader metaphors for our problematic relationship with the environment in the Anthropocene era.
Another aspect of his work is his relationship with mass media and popular culture. Sasnal doesn’t hesitate to draw from album covers, films, advertisements, or the Internet. But beware, this is not mere Pop Art recycling à la Warhol. No, Sasnal uses these images like archaeologists use artifacts: to understand our present through its most mundane representations. This is what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible”—the redistribution of images that determines what is visible and what is not in our society. When he paints a scene from a film or an image found online, he doesn’t just reproduce it; he transforms it, deconstructs it, reinvents it to make us see what lies behind its seemingly banal surface.
In his films, often created in collaboration with his wife Anka, such as “It Looks Pretty from a Distance” (2011), Sasnal pushes this exploration of our relationship with images even further. These cinematic works are not mere extensions of his pictorial practice but deep meditations on the very nature of representation. By often using non-professional actors and filming seemingly mundane scenes with almost unbearable intensity, he creates what Gilles Deleuze called “time-images”—images that force us to think about time itself. His films are radical visual experiences that challenge our habits as viewers and our ways of consuming images.
His work on collective memory is particularly poignant. When he tackles subjects like the Holocaust or communism, he never does so directly or illustratively. On the contrary, he finds oblique angles, indirect approaches that make these subjects even more present in their apparent absence. This is what historian Pierre Nora called “places of memory”—points of crystallization for our collective memory. Sasnal understands that some historical realities are too complex, too painful to be represented directly. He chooses to approach them peripherally, creating works that function as echoes, reverberations of these historical traumas.
What is particularly remarkable about Sasnal is that he maintains conceptual coherence while constantly varying his stylistic approaches. He can move from hyperrealistic painting to gestural abstraction without ever losing the thread of his reflection on the image. This versatility is not inconsistency but rather what philosopher Theodor Adorno called “non-identity”—the ability to resist any definitive categorization. Every new series, every new project is a different exploration of our relationship with images, history, and memory.
His practice of painting is deeply contemporary, not because it follows fashions or trends but because it constantly questions what it means to paint today. In a world saturated with digital images, where photography and video are omnipresent, Sasnal reaffirms the relevance of painting not as a nostalgic or reactionary practice but as a unique means of questioning our relationship to the visible. Every painting is a proposal about what painting can be in the 21st century.
His most recent works, exhibited notably at the Whitechapel Gallery and Hauser & Wirth, show an artist at the height of his maturity who continues to take risks. He does not hesitate to tackle burning issues like the refugee crisis or the rise of populism in Europe, but always with the critical distance that has characterized his work from the beginning. These works remind us of what Hannah Arendt said about the “banality of evil”—how the greatest tragedies can arise from the most ordinary situations. Sasnal shows us that contemporary art can still be politically engaged without falling into didacticism or propaganda.
Sasnal makes us see the extraordinary in the ordinary, the political in the personal, the historical in the everyday. He doesn’t seek to provide easy answers or ready-made moral judgments. On the contrary, he forces us to question our own position as spectators, our own complicity in the systems of representation he stages. This is what Jacques Derrida called “deconstruction”—the constant process of questioning our most fundamental certainties. Every painting is an invitation to rethink our relationship with images, history, and memory.
The significance of his work far exceeds the framework of Polish or even European contemporary art. Sasnal has succeeded in creating a visual language that speaks universally while remaining deeply rooted in its specific cultural and historical context. This is what philosopher Paul Ricœur called the “paradox of the universal and the particular”—how a singular experience can acquire universal significance. His works speak of post-communist Poland but also of our global contemporary condition, our collective anxieties, hopes, and fears.
Wilhelm Sasnal is much more than a talented painter—he is a true philosopher of the image, a thinker who uses painting as a tool for investigating reality. When everything seems to have already been shown, photographed, and filmed, he still manages to surprise us, destabilize us, and make us see differently. His work reminds us that art is not there to comfort us in our certainties but to shake them, to force us to look at what we might sometimes prefer not to see.
So yes, you bunch of snobs, Wilhelm Sasnal is perhaps one of the most important artists of his generation, not because he creates “beautiful” paintings or because he is valued on the art market but because he forces us to rethink our relationship with images, history, memory, and the present. At a time when the image has become both omnipresent and insignificant, his work reminds us that painting can still be a powerful critical tool, a means of resistance against the generalized banalization of our visual experience. Sasnal shows us that it is still possible to create images that matter, images that force us to think, to feel, to remember. And perhaps that is his greatest achievement: having restored to painting its ability to move us and make us reflect in a world that seems to have lost its capacity to do either.