Everyone has a photo in the family album they cannot remember being taken and still count as their own. This painting works the same way: a bare branch on plaster and the slant of a window frame on the left, and on the right, behind the glass, people huddled at a table in greenish light, one face right up against the pane. Giordano Bruno wrote that an imagined picture carries its own truth. So the family on the right can be anyone's, yours included.
The painter
Tomasz Kowalski (born 1984) graduated from the Faculty of Painting at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. A figurative and symbolic painter, he also makes collages, machine-like objects, installations and video and sound works. He received the Guerlain Foundation Drawing Award in 2014 and runs the music label Alicja.