In this exhibition, however, the artist does not linger on his film: he’s far more interested in what these paintings can achieve on their own, liberated from an overarching narrative. Most of the works on view are reproductions of iconic paintings by famous artists, including Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Leonardo da Vinci. This is not the first time Sasnal has ‘borrowed’ from other artists – often addressing historical conditions in his own country. In 2001, he extracted and copied details from the graphic novel Maus (1991), in which the author, Art Spiegelman, interviews his Polish-Jewish father about his experiences of the Holocaust. Despite being reproductions, Sasnal’s works are immediately recognizable as his own due to his unique aesthetic: paint is applied thickly to create simultaneously flat yet lively images of landscapes, buildings, objects, and people in a palette that ranges from vibrant colors to monochrome.
One striking connection is between Sasnal’s reproduction of The Green Stripe (1905) by Matisse – in which the French artist depicts his stern-looking wife, Amélie – and two portraits of Sasnal’s own wife, Anka, looking at the gate of the Auschwitz II–Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. In First of January (Back) (2023), she looks straight ahead, while in First of January (Side) (2023), she turns her head to the right to look at the camp. Again, questions linger – how and when do past and present intersect? What have we learned from (art) history?
