New York, Anton Kern Gallery, Wilhelm Sasnal, 16 January - 15 February, 2003
Literature
M. Landsman, For Your Pleasure, Frieze, Issue 75, May, 2003
Catalogue Essay
Sasnal is...capable of producing paintings that afford an immediate, arresting aesthetic pleasure, quite unrelated to the larger questions about representation and perception...figurative or abstract, blurred or razor-sharp in focus, austerely muted or brilliantly vibrant incolour. Those who encounter the work of this thoughtful Polish painter for the first time may, however, wonder: where is the central thread? Cemetery (2002), to take an example from his recent show at Anton Kern Gallery, New York, consists of two joined pieces of canvas on which the artist painted a bright, flesh-coloured background, squeezed out several randomly placed blobs of royal blue paint and then smeared each of them with the flick of a finger.You could see the image as an abstract rendering of burning candleson a grave, with each smear of blue representing a flickering flame,or as an overhead perspective, looking down on a graveyard in which the blue smudges evoke individual tombstones and departing souls. Either way it has an insidious emotional impact. (M. Landsman, "For Your Pleasure", Frieze, Issue 75, May, 2003)