Norman Leto

Norman Leto (real name Łukasz Banach, b. 1980 in Bochnia) is a self-taught artist - painter, creator of films and spatial objects, and a writer. He ended his formal education at the secondary-school level, teaching himself graphics programs on his own. In his work he combines the visual arts, film and literature with advanced 3D animation, creating worlds in which reality mixes with the imagination; one of his mentors was Zdzisław Beksiński.

In 2007 he made his debut with the solo exhibition „Negative Aspects of Excessive Freedom at the Age of 26” at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art and collaborated with Krystian Lupa on the video material for the production „Factory 2”. His most important projects are the diptych „Sailor” (2010) - a novel and a feature-length film, well received at festivals in Poland and abroad - and „Photon” (2017), a docudrama about the origins of life and matter with Andrzej Chyra as narrator. „Photon” won the Audience Award at the New Horizons festival and the Golden Claw in Gdynia, and then reached the Netflix platform.

In painting Leto moves freely between conventions - from abstraction and minimalist landscapes to photorealistic, strongly emotional scenes - painting on the basis of photographs, nature or a video frame and experimenting with artificial-intelligence generators. A laureate of the Polityka Passport in the field of the visual arts, he also appeared in a music video by the band Radiohead. His works have been shown by, among others, the National Museum in Kraków, the State Art Gallery in Sopot and the Wallspace Gallery in Warsaw.