Wilhelm Sasnal

Considered to be one of the most successful and prominent contemporary Polish artists, Wilhelm Sasnal is a painter, film-maker, illustrator and poster-artist. As a painter, Sasnal’s subjects span a wide range including mundane, every-day objects; historical figures, portraits of friends and family, and views of Kraków, his home town. Among Sasnal’s most popular works are his portraits of women – this work serves to explore the notion of modern beauty and highlights the constructs within society, media and fashion that tend to represent beauty, as opposed to the actual physicality of the women themselves; Sasnal alludes to the eventual decay of all beauty by depicting all of his female subjects to be smoking. His work tends to be centred around the history of art, and the functioning of modern society under the influence of mass media, an analysis of reality as we understand it – he has stated: “I don’t know where history ends and the present moment begins. It’s like liquid, or sometimes like mud.”