Helena Palazzi

Multi-media artist Helena Palazzi reconnected with her Swedish roots and the stories she heard as a child about Nordic mythology, Viking women warriors, and forest spirits.

The images presented here are photographic reproductions of one-of-a-kind portrait and landscape artworks Helena creates. For the original pieces, she uses various media and techniques, from shooting with an infrared camera to add a certain otherworldliness to her colors, to printing the different image layers on fragile rice paper before sealing them with encaustic.

The layered images draw you in as you discover textures, details, and symbols buried within them.

Helena Palazzi grew up in Sweden, where equality between men and women is valued. I imagine this helped shape her image of women as strong and independent beings.

Her early exposure to movies and fashion magazines fueled her with powerful iconography. It was the 80s, a time of big hair and even bigger shoulder pads, when larger-than-life supermodels reigned supreme.

Helena Palazzi’s interest in art brought her to photography. With a second-hand film camera and a darkroom set up in her family’s garage, she started to experiment, looking to capture fragile moments of beauty.

In her early 20s she moved to Italy, her father’s country. There her Scandinavian roots mixed with the Latin world and she embraced Italy’s sophistication and elegance. With other young photographers, she founded a studio and enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia, Umbria. Less than two years later, she had her first solo exhibition. Many more would follow over the next few years, featuring her photography along with her mixed media work. 

She landed in New York in 1998, set on pursuing a career in commercial photography. But fashion and beauty imagery drew her in and she quickly switched gears. Her seductive and refined images got her noticed and she started to work with some of the world’s most renowned clients and creatives.

Helena’s work draws from her Scandinavian and Southern European roots. Her style is timeless, elegant and sprinkled with retro references. Her photos appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet; well-known tropes merge; and past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. Applying a poetic and often cinematic visual language, she seduces the viewer into a quest to find poetic meaning in everyday life.

Since 2019 Helena has made Kingston, NY, her home. There she opened a studio, Yellow House Production, where she welcomes her New York business and local clients. She is currently engaged in a diverse lineup of projects, from fashion editorial to beauty shoots, and high-end product photography, to portraits and fine art.