Set inside a gothic castle, paintings and films in this show were an exploration of how Wilhelm Sasnal has interpreted his memories of Hans
Christian Anderson's books of fairy tales, which he read as a young boy in Poland.
He was particularly fascinated by the illustrations of Audrzej Strumillo.
Sasnal is thought to have selected the venue on a visit in 2012
and decided this body of work, emanating from his fascination with the
illustrations, would be a great match.
The gallery is long and
rectangular with suspended beams across the vaulted ceiling with roof windows.
It was very well lit at the time by both natural and artificial lighting and white painted
walls. It is contemporary looking and relatively small and intimate in relation
to the very large scale of the old castle it resides in.
The sound of ‘Dirt’ 1970 by The Stooges was playing in the
background as a soundtrack to a film (playing at one end of the long first room) by Sasnal called Inhuman Finger, It was about a girl who tries to use a loaf of bread
as a stepping stone into another world without getting her shoes dirty. Things
go wrong and she ends up falling off in to hell. Perhaps the bread serves as a
metaphor for potential path to freedom (in more ways than one)
Among a number of paintings containing floating objects was one containing a large black bike seat bizarrely suspended in mid air on a summery blue and white sky, above a large expanse of green and blue still water. Black silhouetted trees and vegetation travel along the low horizon, tapering off into the distance. The bike seat totally dominates the scene.
Unitled 2013
http://de.phaidon.com/resource/sasnal-untitled2013.jpg
My favourite, is another painting containing a surreal
floating object. A smaller painting, this time (2' x 2') containing a hovering
skull, devoid of a jaw, within whose black eye sockets could be a black castle;
the castle's black windows acting as its eyes. The skull floats low slung on a
large expanse of jade green sky like background. A thickly painted deep
yellow sun, egg yolk like, hovers above to the upper right. Along the bottom is
a horizon of jagged acid green mountains. On first glance is deceptively
simple in appearance but on closer inspection I realized there appears to quite an intriguing narrative at work.
http://cristinleach.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/photo-52-e1415012045838.jpg
Frequent clever characteristics of his paintings are their sparse
brushwork – just enough detail to get the message across by evoking a sense of
all the elements belonging where they are on the picture surface as a cohesive
whole. Certain distinguishing features of many portraits are what I would
describe as half painted, with partly blank or unidentifiable faces. This small
portrait of the artist’s brother by Valdemar_Hjartvar_Kobke, is no exception.
He was a Danish Golden Age painter who
was a contemporary of Hans Christian Anderson. The only exeptions to the
monochromatic palette of black and browns on the head are the red and yellow on
the military collar. In Sasnal’s interpretation, a remake of the original he
has been very sparing in his description of the facial features; says it all
with just a few spontaneous lines and marks. The facial features fade out to a
totally blank white area - the lower left side of the face.
Original portrait:
Monochrome landscape
http://magazynszum.pl/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/SZUM-20140612-00-15-420x280.jpg
View of gallery
http://magazynszum.pl/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/SZUM-20140611-23-27-420x280.jpg
