Located on Savile Row, London’s famous street of tailors, Sadie Coles HQ is currently hosting a new exhibition by Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal that is both deeply intimate and disturbingly political. The selection titled “family / history”, which will run until 23 May 2026, knots together the warm harbours of the artist’s inner world with the stormy events of the outside world on the same canvas. With this exhibition, Sasnal reveals that family history is not merely about domestic peace; rather, it shows how politics and culture shape, expand, and sometimes completely destroy this private space.
Sasnal describes his paintings as “cover versions” of existing images, always starting from an archived memento or a photograph he has taken himself. However, his relationship with these secondary images behind the canvas is based not on copying but on reduction: colours are simplified, certain elements are completely erased, and what remains is transformed into exaggerated brushstrokes. Just as memory itself can never be fully trusted yet manages to preserve the essence of a touching moment, Sasnal’s paintings offer emotion rather than reality. By revisiting a memory from years ago or an encounter belonging to previous generations, the artist reinterprets them on a painted album page.
Prominent themes stand out in the exhibition: alongside family portraits, music, landscape, and politics return with great passion. While the portraits of musicians draw from the power of a beloved artist to evoke a specific era or place, the most striking parts of the exhibition are formed by the greyed-out faces of politicians and studies of centres of power such as the Oval Office. For Sasnal, past and present appear as concepts that can shift places and trigger each other at any moment. As a response to the reality that the heavy images pouring down on us from global news are often softened with cushions on the safe sofas of our homes, this exhibition records the multilayered reality of human experience like a witness.
In your opinion, does Sasnal’s definition of his paintings as “cover versions” mean that art is not an original creation but rather a “discipline of remembering” in which we filter the images the world presents to us through our own sieve?
