Helen Tóth

Helen Tóth (*1992, Dunajská Streda) lives and works in Bratislava. She is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, where she studied in the painting studios of Ivan Csudai, Daniel Fischer, Rastislav Podhorský, and Martin Špirc. She is a three-time finalist for the VÚB Painting Award (2017, 2022, 2023), was nominated for the Piero D’Amore e Colore Award (The Others, Turin, 2022), was longlisted for the STRABAG Art Award International 2022, and was selected for the Zlín Youth Salon 2024 and, in 2025, the prestigious Salon d’Automne in Paris. In her work, she has long focused on painting, drawing, and installations, through which she explores the forest as an autonomous visual language. For her, the motifs of branches and trees represent an inexhaustible visual resource that allows her to develop themes of ecology, the relationship between humans and nature, and inner transformation. Her works feature lyrical, atmospheric compositions based on the observation of natural structures, delicate lines, textures, and a muted color palette. The process of removal is also important to her, leaving traces of absence in the paintings—visual metaphors for the disappearance of forest ecosystems. Alongside painting, she creates small-scale installations and land-art interventions: she returns painted branches to the landscape and observes their new existence in the forest environment. It is in this gesture that she connects poetics with ecological sensitivity, viewing nature not only lyrically, but also critically.