“The octopus and I” från serien To Mother Earth with Love

Helena Smeds is a contemporary Swedish artist whose abstract painting explores the interplay between nature, light, movement, depth, and human perception and experience. Her work inhabits a space between the organic and the cosmic, where layered colour, built-up structures, and shifting forms create spaces for both presence and interpretation. Drawing on a background in psychology and a PhD in bilingualism, Smeds’ artistic practice nevertheless emerges primarily through intuition, flow, and experimentation. Her process is exploratory and spontaneous, allowing material, movement, and creative impulse to interact and shape each work. Nature’s rhythms, oceans, light phenomena, organic structures, and aspects of our inner and outer universe recur as underlying references, never depicted literally. Instead, Smeds creates pictorial spaces in which depth, movement, transformation, and perception become central. Successive layers of colour and structure build a sense of spatiality and rhythm, while light becomes an active element of the image. The paintings shift with changing light, viewing distance, movement, and attention. ”Windows to the Soul of the Universe” is an ongoing body of work exploring the relationship between human experience and recurring patterns in our inner and outer nature—from the microscopic to the cosmic. Rather than offering fixed narratives, the paintings invite an open, personal encounter in which connections and meanings emerge through the viewer. Smeds has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Sweden, including at NK Stockholm during spring and summer 2006 with Artist Arena, as well as in international exhibitions and curator-led projects in Italy, including Rome and L’Aquila. During Venice Biennale, in the autumn of 2026, she will also exhibit at Venice International Art Fair. In December 2026, her work will be presented in the contemporary art catalogue The Form of the Invisible: Art as Revelation and Cure for the World, curated by Monica Ferrarini and Alice Di Piero.