WILHELM SASNAL - GREY EYES
- Date
- From 24.04.2026 to 12.09.2026
- Place
-
Espace Louis Vuitton München
-
Maximilianstrasse 2a
-
80539 München
- Phone
-
+49 89 55 89 38 100,
- Hours
-
Monday–Friday : 12p.m.–7 pm; Saturday: 10 am–7 pm
SELECTED WORKS FROM THE COLLECTION
Marking the 20th anniversary of the Espaces Louis Vuitton and the 10th anniversary of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s Hors-les-murs programme, the Espace Louis Vuitton München presents an exhibition devoted to the work of Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal.
Since the 1990s, Wilhelm Sasnal has developed a body of work that questions our relationship to images, history, and memory. His artistic practice centres on painting, while extending to drawing and film, with a consistent economy of means.
Wilhelm Sasnal, UNTITLED(POTATO MOUNTAIN)
Courtesy of the artist
At the heart of his approach is a close attention to the images that shape everyday life: press photographs, domestic scenes, film stills, and found documents. Rather than reproducing them, he transforms them – simplifying, cropping, and fragmenting. The image enters an uncertain state, both recognisable and partly withdrawn, creating a tension between visibility and concealment. Painting becomes a space of recomposition where forms emerge and recede, and framing tightens or opens out. Each work proposes a singular mode of seeing, inviting the viewer to project associations and accept uncertainty as part of perception.
Sasnal’s painting is marked by great formal freedom. He moves from smooth finishes to more spontaneous brushwork, while portraits, landscapes, architecture, and fragments of reality coexist without hierarchy. This mobility reflects an adaptation to the subject rather than a fixed style. Never illustrative, his work carries a quiet unease: seemingly ordinary scenes reveal a historical, political, or emotional depth. History – particularly that of Poland and 20th-century Europe – appears as a diffuse presence embedded in the language of painting.
Wilhelm Sasnal, Bathers at Asnieres, 2010
Courtesy of the artist and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
Wilhelm Sasnal, UNTITLED(TRAFFIC), 2024
Courtesy of the artist and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
Grey Eyes brings together works from the past two decades, drawn from the Collection and the artist’s studio. Assembled by Sasnal himself, it places intimate images in tension with broader resonances. The recurring motif of the eye introduces a reflection on seeing a world saturated with images.
Grey – a colour neither fully opaque nor transparent – becomes a sign of ambiguity: eyes that are tired, turned away, or open yet unseeing. Thus, the exhibition raises a simple question: what does it mean to see today? Sasnal offers no fixed answer. His work opens unstable spaces of perception, where what is shown matters as much as what is withheld, reaffirming painting’s ability to generate meaning without fixing it.
Wilhelm Sasnal
Wilhelm Sasnal trained as an architect but is first and foremost a painter. He works in numerous other mediums including photography, the graphic novel, film and video. His subjects are daily life, historical figures, views of Kraków and important moments in the lives of his friends and family. Sasnal also appropriates images found on the Internet and in the mass media.
Sasnal studied architecture for two years from 1992 at the Tadeusz Kościuszko University of Technology in Kraków. He then turned to fine art and studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. There, until 2000, he exhibited with the artists’ collective known as Ładnie Group - a Polish term for “pretty” – who depicted their contemporary, banal surroundings using a “non-professional” aesthetic that countered the style taught at the academy. Sasnal completed his studies in 1999, then worked briefly for advertising agencies in Kraków while pursuing his personal work.
