Declaring, “an artist must be aware of the world and the society which he or she is a part of,” Wilhelm Sasnal produces evocative paintings through which he explores his native Poland, his place in the world, and the resonance of the past in the present. True to his time, Sasnal draws images from sources high and low, including the Internet, art history, snapshots, and cartoons. He approaches painting as a reductive process, stripping down or partially obscuring his source images to make them semi-ambiguous. In his critically acclaimed “Maus” series (2001), he isolated drawings from Art Spiegelman’s famous graphic novel, revealing how iconic they have become. Sasnal’s work is underpinned by struggle—with the process of painting itself, and with the artist’s role as a bearer of witness to the horror and wonder of history and contemporary life.