Grey Eyes: Wilhelm Sasnal Explores How We See in New Espace Louis Vuitton München Exhibition

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. This exhibition is part of the Hors-les-murs programme, showcasing holdings of the Collection at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul, and Osaka, thereby embodying the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s mission to mount international projects and reach a broader global audience. 

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. 

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 The image enters an uncertain state, both recognisable and partly withdrawn, creating a tension between visibility and concealment.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.

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 (born in 1972 in Tarnów, Poland) lives and works in Kraków, Poland. He began his studies in architecture at the Polytechnic in Kraków in 1992 before pursuing painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, where he graduated in 1999. During this period, he co-founded the Polish painter group Ładnie, contributing to the emergence of a new generation of artists in post-communist Poland. His academic background and early collective experience shaped a practice rooted in both formal experimentation and a critical engagement with contemporary visual culture. 

Since the 1990s, Sasnal has developed a body of work that questions the circulation and the meaning of images, as well as their relationship to history and memory. Primarily a painter, his practice also extends to drawing and film, maintaining a consistent economy of means across media. He often draws on photographic sources – from stills and art reproductions to images from popular culture or his archive – which he transforms through simplification, distortion, and abstraction. His subjects range from intimate scenes of everyday life to broader historical and political themes, including references to the Holocaust. Over time, his work has evolved toward a more introspective and context-sensitive approach, reflecting both his immediate environments and wider social narratives. In parallel, he has developed a film practice in collaboration with director and screenwriter Anka Sasnal, exploring similar tensions between the personal and the political. 

Sasnal’s work has been widely exhibited internationally and is included in major institutional collections. His exhibitions include presentations at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (The Netherlands, 2024), the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw (Poland, 2021), Kistefos Museet in Oslo (Norway, 2018), the 31st Bienal de São Paulo (Brazil, 2014), Haus der Kunst in Munich (Germany, 2012), Whitechapel Gallery in London (United Kingdom, 2011), K21 in Düsseldorf (Germany, 2009), the 55th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (USA, 2008), Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw (Poland, 2007), the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (The Netherlands, 2006), and Kunsthalle Zürich (Switzerland, 2003) among others. 

The Fondation Louis Vuitton serves the public interest and is exclusively dedicated to contemporary art and artists, as well as 20th-century works to which their inspirations can be traced. The Collection and the exhibitions it organises seek to engage a broad public. The magnificent building created by the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, and already recognised as an emblematic example of the 21st-century architecture, constitutes the Fondation’s seminal artistic statement. Since its opening in October 2014, the Fondation has welcomed more than twelve million visitors from France and around the world.

The Fondation Louis Vuitton commits to engage in international initiatives, both at the Fondation and in partnership with public and private institutions, such as the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (Icons of Modern Art. The Shchukin Collection in 2016 and The Morozov Collection in 2021), the MoMA in New York (Being Modern: MoMA in Paris), the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (The Courtauld Collection. A Vision for Impressionism), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art (Joan Mitchell Retrospective) among others. The Fondation also developed a specific “Hors-les-murs” programme taking place within the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka, presenting exhibitions of artworks from the Collection. These exhibitions are open to the public free of charge. 

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