Aquarium 

Iwo Zaniewski created this painting, titled "Aquarium," employing oil paint. There are two ways to view this image, the most obvious is a normal domestic interior, but if you look closer you can see fish swimming through the room. The effect this produces makes you reflect on the sense of separation between the domestic space and the natural world, perhaps commenting on a modern alienation from nature, or even from natural human instincts. Zaniewski was born in Poland, which at that time was under the control of a communist government and a satellite of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had an ideological commitment to the concept of the "new Soviet man," a utopian ideal of a person liberated from capitalist exploitation and traditional social conventions. The painting appears to be in dialogue with that project, suggesting a kind of surreal domesticity. To understand this work better, one might research the changing symbolic meanings of interior spaces and the communist attitude to human nature. Remember that art's meaning is always shaped by its social and institutional context.