Hitler
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- Hitler
- 2010
- oil on canvas, wood
- 40 × 35 × 6,5 cm
“Hitler” is a small-format painting covered in diagonal brushstrokes running from top-right to bottom-left and done in various shades of blackish gray to which a board, painted in similar hues and with jagged ends that extend beyond the format, is attached diagonally so as to run parallel to the brushstrokes. Sasnal made the following comments on this painting in an e-mail sent to the author on 13 December 2021: “Painting ‘Hitler’ was a peculiar experience for me. I was trying to find out what it means to paint and spend time with an image of such evil. It was confusing and, in a way, I couldn’t stand the intact portrait of Hitler that I had just painted. Therefore, I smeared the paint and nailed the wooden beam diagonally to refer to Oskar Hansen’s project for an Auschwitz monument.”
Hansen, in the context of the International Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Competition (1957/58), had suggested creating an asphalt path that would run diagonally through the camp, with the rest of the site being given over to nature. Sasnal, in “Hitler,” turns painting into smearing and matches the image of evil by destroying the artistic language employed. He makes simultaneous reference to the landscape, which bears indelible traces of the associated “crime against humanity, perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people” (Hannah Arendt)—the demonstration of which was most probably the intention behind Hansen’s competition entry. It was in this spirit that `”Hitler” was shown publicly for the first time in Sasnal’s exhibition Such a Landscape at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw (2021/22). U.L.
Hansen, in the context of the International Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Competition (1957/58), had suggested creating an asphalt path that would run diagonally through the camp, with the rest of the site being given over to nature. Sasnal, in “Hitler,” turns painting into smearing and matches the image of evil by destroying the artistic language employed. He makes simultaneous reference to the landscape, which bears indelible traces of the associated “crime against humanity, perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people” (Hannah Arendt)—the demonstration of which was most probably the intention behind Hansen’s competition entry. It was in this spirit that `”Hitler” was shown publicly for the first time in Sasnal’s exhibition Such a Landscape at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw (2021/22). U.L.