Anyone who has fed swans in a park knows this moment: the bread is gone and the birds refuse to believe it. A man in a black coat holds out empty hands, one swan already tugging at his coat, another coming in from the right, its neck bent like a question mark. Konrad Żukowski says that for balance he paints three dark canvases and then three light ones. Hard to say which batch this is: the black coat holds the centre, yet most of the canvas is white.
The painter
Konrad Żukowski (born 1995) studied at the academies of fine arts in Krakow and Vienna. He paints domestic, psychologically charged scenes that tilt the ordinary house slightly off, full of figures caught peeking and a quiet, low dread, with something of the spirit of early-twentieth-century Montmartre about them. He has shown in Warsaw, Athens, New York and Paris.