Wilhelm Sasnal is one of the most celebrated artists to emerge from Eastern Europe in the twenty-first century. His practice embraces drawing, film, comics (his strips are regularly published in Machina and Przekroj, two Polish periodicals) and, above all, painting. Prolific, varied and deliberately unclassifiable, Sasnal channels the enigma of our contemporary image-based society.? For him, art is largely a mystery [that] touches upon the invisible, the unnamed.

The work of Wilhelm Sasnal is best summed up inthe following quote: 'There are no rules. There are things that intrigue me.'For his drawings, films, comics and, above all, his paintings,Sasnal approaches the world around him as a stockpile of imagery. Pictures of aeroplanes or album covers sit alongside half-buried memorles of Second World War atrocities and Cold War paranoia. Although his paintings don't move, they are animated by a constant tension between abstraction and representation, between illusionism and the abrupt materiality of paint itself. Sasnal is a master at capturing the transition between two states of matter. In his paintings, brush stroke and image swap places, crossing and recrossing the boundary between depiction and abstraction, often several times in a single canvas.

In parallel to Sasnal's painting practice is his filmmaking. In 2001 he picked up his first eight-mfllimetre camera, and nine years later he completed his first feature-length thirty-fivemillimetre film, Fallout. Like his painhngs, his films are the product of his abiding interest in the nature of seeing. Often confronting the history (and, in Fallout, the apocalyptic futurel of his native Poland, his films encapsulate his ongoing att'empt to translate the distance between lived experience and the imagery that mediates it. By followlng his intuition, Sasnal has created an encylopaedic view of the visual world around him -- the 'things that intrigue me' -- centred around his ongoing fascination with the possibilities and limits of representation.It is this encyclopaedic eye and his beguiling facility with his medium that have made him one of the most captivahng artists working today.

Sasnal was born in TarnOw, Poland, in 1972 and later attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, where he now lives. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums and galleries across Europe, including Kunsthalle ZUrich (2003),Frankfurter Kunstvereln (2006) and Whltechapel Art Gallery (2011). In 2006 he was the recipient of the Vincent van Gogh Biennial Award for Contemporary Art.

In the Survey, DOMINIC EICHLER.traces Sasnal's development as an artist from his early days as a student and his first appearances on the international art scene in the 2000s to the subsequent evolution and maturation of his work; for the Interview ANDRZE3 PRZYWARA discusses with Sasnal the relationship between art and history, examimng the artist's decision to ernploy politically charged themes in many of his artworks; JORG HEISER, in the Focus, looks at .Maus (2001), a series of paintings inspired by the award-winning graphic novel by Art Spiegelman; for Artist's Choice Sasnal has selected 'Poison', a short story by Tadeusz Rdzewicz (b. 1921),one of Poland's greatest twentieth-century authors; Artist's Writings include an early conversation with Andrzej Przywara,as well as Sasnal's screenplays for his films Widlik (2007) and Swineherd (2008l, both previously unpublished in English.