Curator: Joanna Zielińska

The exhibition of the works by Tomasz Kowalski and the premiere of the film made together with Norman Leto is intended to be the first of a series presenting the young CoCA artists in Toruń.
The minimalist, reductionist forms of paintings and installations by Tomasz Kowalski are a result of his latest creative experiments. The artist started from complicated, rich in detail compositions. The works display a characteristic for Tomasz Kowalski fascination with the dream reality and a sophisticated set of metaphors. The forms return in new openings.

The film made with Norman Leto is a journey into “the inside” of the picture. The computer created fictional world that is deceptively close to reality is a reflection of imagination and fantasies.  Animation goes well with the activity to date of Norman Leto, who often uses the interiors of the galleries to create “impossible works” within them. In this case, the artist was inspired by the works of Tomasz Kowalski. The economical form of the work blend here with the richness of meanings; the world created by the artists is devoted to what is invisible, unsaid and ghostly.
Tomasz Kowalski (born in 1984) lives in Berlin. He is one of Poland’s most promising young artists. In 2009 he graduated from the Department of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. His early pictures show his inspiration by renaissance painting, surrealism, suprematism, and the futuristic costumes of Oscar Schlemmer. Most importantly, however, Tomek Kowalski has developed his own original artistic language, which is constantly developing. His first paintings had a complicated structure and a complex narration, they employed a set of reworked, distinctive motifs. For the last year the artist is reducing the forms, simultaneously compounding the composition freely using his formerly developed repertoire. More and more often he employs other media, makes paper cycles, collages, modeling clay pictures, sculptures and installations.
Norman Leto (born in1980, in Bochnia) lives and works in Cracow. In 1999 he gave up his secondary education and began his career as a graphic artist and painter. He is self-taught. For a few months he worked for an animated film company. In 2001 he took part in a joint exhibition in Melbourne, and since then he gained considerable popularity in Australia, which resulted in the first purchase offers. He is fascinated with virtual reality and computer games, his works are intuitive and emotional. For the needs of a film he made he invented the character of a fictional painter, whose name he adopted and uses till this day. His work, apart from painting, includes photography, objects, videos, and computer simulations.