Foksal Gallery Foundation

About

Wilhelm Sasnal, Painting
“These paintings are associated with the comic book I'm working on now. When I was researching the history of my ancestors and the kind of life they led, I discovered that women's folk costumes used to be decorated with oil paint. I thought that I would relate to this by creating rural-themed paintings on canvas. The first painting was Courbet's The Stone Breakers . Courbet matters to me on account of his dense style, his depiction of everyday life, naturalism, and nature. That's why I made this painting and that's why the rural peasant motifs are present. The appropriation of the image is important - the black and white painting based on black and white photography is reminiscent of the past, as if I made two steps back in time, into the past of the past. "