Mr Smo (Adam Smoczyński) - visual artist.
He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk in 2002. His artistic path grew out of a classical art education based on drawing, painting and printmaking. Over time, his interest shifted from representation toward the mechanisms through which images emerge and the role of tools in shaping them.
In his early years he worked with animation, analogue film, video and digital image, experimenting with the recording and transformation of the image during its formation. He constructed his own optical devices, in which the image was not merely captured but formed within the apparatus itself. Using self-built pinhole cameras, he also realised experimental films exploring the act of seeing.
Gradually, the focus of his practice moved from recording images to constructing them. Since 2015, working under the pseudonym Mr Smo, he has developed his own material techniques, creating layered structures from paper and concrete that exist on the boundary between painting and object. The processes of layering, compressing and combining materials have become the core language of his work, in which the image takes the form of a physical structure.
His works are developed in cycles and focus on perception, models of observation and the material construction of the image. Often they evoke forms resembling models or observational instruments. Rather than offering explanations, they create situations in which something may be discovered.
You Shall Have No Other Sun Before Me
Solo exhibition: paintings, photographs, film, installation
The Mendelsohn House, Olsztyn, 27.08-27.09.2021
This exhibition explored imagination as a force capable of symbolically touching a star.
Its starting point was the observation of the Sun – a source of light, warmth, and life, but also an inevitable ending. Through paintings, photographs, and film, the project unfolded as a reflection on light as a trace, on memory inscribed in the skin, and on artistic process as a bridge between scientific data and personal experience.
The project was presented in the House of Purification (Bet Tahara), now known as the Mendelsohn House – a former Jewish pre-burial building in Olsztyn, designed in 1913 by architect Erich Mendelsohn.
Passing Through Cologne
Solo exhibition: mixed media objects
City Health Office, Cologne, Germany, 11.2020
The exhibition told the story of an encounter with a city that, for years, existed only from a distance – seen through the windows of passing trains.
It was an attempt to capture memory not only as a collection of images, but as something that had been waiting to awaken. At its core were sketches – urban, momentary, spontaneous, fragile – and their further development into a personal visual language based on paper and concrete. Initiated during visits to Cologne between 2015 and 2019, the works found their form at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and became a reflection on time gone by.
Presented at the City Health Office in Cologne, the exhibition became a quiet dialogue between being in transit and arriving – between the interior of the city and the fleeting presence of someone from the outside.
*OBSCURION – Constructing the Image from Within
Obscurion is an experimental camera that does not capture reality but transforms it. It is not a transparent medium—it is sculpture, painting, and photography in one.
Decisions made before opening the shutter—the construction of the camera, the structure of its interior, and the materials placed inside—shape the final image as much as the light entering it. The reality in front of the lens merges with the reality already present inside the camera.
Obscurions were created in various configurations, assembled into objects at the intersection of construction and sculpture. In the design phase, I also envisioned large structures capable of housing human figures, making them another layer in the path of light.
They do not document—they create the conditions for an image to emerge, imprinting the process of their own construction.
The earliest photographs taken with Obscurions were gathered into a series and presented under the title "Sky Over Berlin" in 2006 year as solo exhibitions:
