Wilhelm Sasnal, A Year with Walser

Wilhelm Sasnal (b. 1972, Tarnów), a leading figure of contemporary painting, is recognised for his figurative work drawn from photographic imagery. Exploring themes of collective memory and pop culture, Sasnal reenvisages the familiar through distortion and shortening to create distinctive timestamps. With his wife Anka, Sasnal has turned to filmmaking, applying his ability to create discordant compositions and nostalgia to the medium of film. His newest project shot on film, a feature-length adaptation of Robert Walser’s novel The Assistant (Der Gehülfe), premiered at the 2025 Rotterdam International Film Festival, and was the focus of his solo exhibition curated by Adam Szymczyk at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2024), Painting as Prop.

Wilhelm and Anka Sasnal’s reimagining of The Assistant (Der Gehülfe) is a fin-de-siècle period piece interwoven with echoes of 1970s surrealist cinema. Journeying alongside protagonist Joseph Marti, the hired assistant of mercurial inventor Carl Tobler, the film traces a process of seduction and gradual entrapment, in which a man is tamed and bound to a place and its people until his sense of freedom erodes. Drawing on Robert Walser’s novel in which the protagonist serves as an alter ego of the author himself, the film foregrounds the enduring mechanism of labour-induced humiliation as a social norm, rendering Marti a contemporary figure whose experience echoes the realities of our own.

This publication, as an accompaniment to the work, contains commissioned text, dialogue between the actors of the film, and a conversation with Sasnal, offering a comprehensive study of the artist’s filmic methodology and the context framing Robert Walser’s novel.