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Charlie Mills: I would like to start with the title of the exhibition, family/history. These two subjects are central thematics in your practice. However, it is the first time they have been placed so starkly next to each other. The implication is an ever-narrowing gap, perhaps indistinguishable between the two – between the people closest to us, our daily lives, and the weight of history. Why did you want to use this tension as a framing device for the show?

Wilhelm Sasnal: I totally agree with you. The gap between these two subjects is tiny. Actually, they are indistinguishable, and it is very hard to divide them. Nevertheless, they are the crucial ones. The title could also refer to family history, which is important for me. But what's the crucial difference between these two is the source material. Family comes from my everyday observations – I take photographs and snapshots with my iPhone. Whilst history, or in this case I would say ‘political paintings’, I take from the media, from the internet, from newspapers and so on.

We face deluges of imagery on a daily basis, across a wide range of media and mediums. In this context, the editorial question of what to represent becomes increasingly vexed. What systems, judgements and feelings guide your selection?

I’ll start with the family photographs. These scenes are never staged: they are incidental, accidental moments that I see and know I must capture. Sometimes I know immediately that images will land in my folder titled ‘To Work’, which is always growing beyond my capacity to paint. Very often I take snapshots while traveling or I receive them from others; the big painting of my son on the sofa was sent to me by his boyfriend, for instance. They are not sent on purpose for me to paint, but I keep them. I store them, and sometimes I know I have to paint them.

In the show there are two paintings of a tree. This is the same tree I pass every day while walking in the park. It’s a catchy image because the tree is deteriorating. First one branch was broken, then it was falling apart completely. The older I am, the more I'm sensitive toward nature. With common images like the Oval Office or Trump with his acolytes, these are images I found. I have two newspapers that I read online: the Guardian and the leading Polish newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza. I take many political images more or less from these two sources. If I have the feeling, ‘it’s not enough’, I dig into the subject and look for images, but pretty much all images are connected to and appear during my everyday life.

It’s funny you mention the two tree paintings, as for me these are deeply ambiguous paintings. Knowing your broader work, one would be forgiven for reading their gnarled trunks as bearing the marks of time and struggle, implying a potentially grave, macabre or sinister weight of history. It’s a great example of playful ambiguity in your paintings, and their ability to both invite and conceal meaning.

These paintings were some of only a few that I made after the main selection. I knew that something like this was missing, this tree... because, at that time, the selection was too smooth or soothing. I had the feeling that it needed something brutal.

There’s another painting which for me has this sense of brutality or foreboding. In the upstairs South Gallery there is a dark architectural facade, a set of stairs with several figures. It includes several signature motifs, such as these dark black squiggles and washes of dark green, which are used in another show in the painting, 20 Jazz Funk Greats (2024) – which I will ask about in a moment – but also your well-known earlier painting, Shoah (A Forest) (2003).

Yes, that’s right, this scene is in fact from Central Park in NY. But funny enough, this was not on purpose, that was simply my struggle with the paint: the black, the green, everything. To be satisfied, I covered the black surface with varnish.

Circling back to the show’s curation, let’s speak now about the selection of paintings for each room in the show. Every room has its ambiguity, its connections and disconnections, but equally its own particular mood, world of associations and feelings. The first room showcases stark collisions between family scenes and contemporary political imagery from the Oval Office. Upstairs, however, there is a pastoral inclination in the North Gallery room, and an almost cacophonous array in the South Gallery, which includes this scene from the park, a red-drenched concert, a portrait of Ornette Coleman and a painting of your wife, Anka, from behind at the fridge. How did this process unfold and who drove it? Or was this a collaborative effort from yourself and the gallery?

In many ways, I was only a witness. Sadie had sent me layouts of the exhibition on SketchUp, which I liked. However, the hanging really happened in person. There was no authoritarian decision making; agreements made between myself, Sadie and the people who were there. I was not the leader of the hanging, and I liked that position. For me, the show is surprisingly colourful. When I see a selection of paintings like that, I want to introduce something dark, heavy or brutal. But I totally agree with the ambience. These rooms definitely have three different atmospheres.

I suppose there are several schools of thoughts for the diverse imagery you find in each room. On the one hand, there is an invitation to make connections, be these feelings or felt things, rather than necessarily rational or logical associations. Another might say that you're spotlighting precisely the fact that it’s impossible to make connections. Do you gravitate toward either of these schools of thought?

For me, the school of thought is similar to a plot. It’s like editing the film, to put associations close together. What is interesting for me is the tension between two paintings and how they are juxtaposed. Sadie focused on something different, letting viewers focus on particular paintings. But of course it's always negotiation between the subject of the paintings, their formal similarities or differences. I like to find the formal echo between paintings, but the subject remains the driving force.