In Pursuit Of Absolute Smoothness: Kristín Helga Ríkharðsdóttir’s Playful Take On Leg Hair And Perfection

I enter the D-Gallery of the Reykjavík Art Museum through a narrow tunnel draped in shimmering, powder-pink fabric. Plastic flowers hang along the tunnel on transparent strings. A curious eye on the wall follows my every move. Someone beside me murmurs, “Careful, you almost stepped on the feet.” Her feet, I assume — until I look down and realise the floor is scattered with pairs of disembodied plastic ones. A white cat rests on a pink cushion. Rows of pink chairs, giving off either weird grandma vibes or a Barbie dream house, face a large screen. A pop-culture thriller begins.

Laser-focused concept

The Smooth Operator (Silkimjúk) is a new video installation of visual artist Kristín Helga Ríkharðsdóttir, and her first solo exhibition in a public museum. The nine-and-a-half-minute film follows a woman obsessed with leg hair — or, as the artist statement puts it, “in pursuit of absolute smoothness of her legs.”

The artwork is simultaneously fun and absurd, with elements of foot fetishism and mild horror — enough to make me close my eyes at least once. At the same time, it certainly skewers a society still ruled by what we see on the pages of glossy magazines — or, more aptly in 2026, by what we scroll past online — including the lingering taboo around unshaved legs that persists in many places. As the character on the screen battles unwanted dark hairs, the audience is casually fed an advertisement for the very device she’s using.

“People relate to my hair obsession and to how it feels to suddenly see one hair in a weird place.”

“I kind of got the idea for this work from a device you can use to laser your legs at home,” says Kristín Helga when we meet a few days after the exhibition opening. “The idea came from that object, and then it grew and went past the point of being necessarily about that object. The work is more about the woman, the actress.”

“Often I get ideas from objects, and very often it’s objects that I see advertised on Instagram, or wherever I’m scrolling,” Kristín Helga continues. “I’ll see something weird being advertised, and I’ll think, ‘This is a really funny device, what if I order it?’ But in this case, I did buy it for myself.”

Following friends’ recommendations, Kristín Helga ordered the device, which she admits was quite expensive. “My first thought when I was buying it for myself was, ‘Can I put this in my tax return?,’” she laughs. She didn’t. The idea for The Smooth Operator came along much later.

Silk smooth productions

The project started with a particular image Kristín Helga had in mind: a person lasering her legs while wearing sunglasses. The laser device acquired a few years ago instantly came in handy. From there, Kristín Helga developed a script, sketched a storyboard, and got together a small crew of friends to bring her vision to life. Over three days, she filmed the video together with actress and choreographer Selma Reynisdóttir, whose dance piece also appears in the work, director of photography Matt Cianfrani, and production assistants Katrín Helga Andrésdóttir and Bjargmundur Kjartansson.

The premise of the video is very simple: a woman is using the laser device to get rid of unwanted hair. Despite the name, things don’t go exactly smoothly.

Unlike the obvious reference, the name of the piece wasn’t inspired by the famous song by Sade. “I was not thinking about the song,” Kristín Helga stresses. “It was just a name that came to me when I was like, ‘Oh, this device is gonna need a name, a fictional name, and then I came up with The Smooth Operator.” The Icelandic name of the project is completely different: Silkimjúk which translates as “silk smooth.” “When the time came to translate it to Icelandic, it felt weird to translate it. I felt like it was like trying to translate like a brand name or something, like trying to translate iPhone,” she says.

The relatability of the work to a bigger crowd is something that surprised Kristín Helga. “One feedback that I necessarily didn’t expect to get is I feel like a lot of people were like, ‘it’s very relatable,’” she says. “They relate to my hair obsession and to how it feels to suddenly see one hair in a weird place or something.”

But whether there’s more she wants the audience to take away, Kristín Helga says, “I don’t want to tell people how to think about it or something, but I definitely want it to be kind of inhale [internalise] this need for smoothness. But not in like ‘the world is bad, everything sucks, and we have to smooth it’ [way]. I want to leave it open for interpretation.”

Fake rocks and face paint

Kristín Helga’s art practice extends beyond working with video. She mixes media — from photography, sculpture, painting to sound — but at its core, her work pokes fun at things she finds in everyday life, or online.

Like The Smooth Operator work, she admits online research has become an integral part of her thought process. “It’s good to scroll with an open mind for ideas,” Kristín says. “It has happened that I see ads or some weird videos that somehow I’m fond of and stop and look at them and think about them as something I could use. I’m just trying to pull things from the everyday, and in this day and age these everyday things can just be scrolling and being sent these weird ads,” she pauses, and quickly adds, “Which I think I get more of because I spend time on them.”

But plenty of her work draws directly from personal experience too. Years ago, working as a park ranger in one of Iceland’s nature reserves, she noticed tourists being fascinated by rare obsidian, which is illegal to be removed from nature. So she created fake stones, or “obbsidian,” as part of the work If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them.

“It’s good to scroll with an open mind for ideas.”

The past year alone has been particularly productive for the artist. Last spring, her solo exhibition Data Craters, consisting of tapestry paintings inspired by the eruptions on Reykjanes Peninsula, was shown at Þula Hafnartorg. More recently, a group exhibition, Sculpture Sculpture Performance, at Gerðarsafn Art Museum wrapped up. There, Kristín Helga showed the previously unseen video work IN IT — to win it and a brand new photography series, Bogi, featuring her grandfather.

“I’ve been photographing my grandfather in different face paints — animals, flowers, colourful creatures that feel childlike, similar to children getting their faces painted on special holidays,” Kristín Helga explains the concept of the series. Over several months, she met with her grandpa, painted his face differently each time, and photographed him on film. The result is a series that plays with contrasts — young and old, real and imagined. It’s not the first time Bogi, Kristín Helga’s grandfather, has appeared in her work. “He is a very jolly and funny person,” she says. “He laughs a lot and thinks everything’s funny. So it was not hard at all [to convince him] — he was just excited to participate. He’s up for doing something weird.”

Photo by Art Bicnick

Complicating things

With so many projects across different formats, Kristín Helga admits that sticking to a single medium would make life easier. “I feel like my ideas are always bringing me to different mediums and places,” she says. “I’m trusting my gut, or the process, but I wish I had just one medium.”

“If you’re a painter, you can make a new painting and it’s kind of similar to the one you did before. When you’re like me, doing different things every time, it just takes a bit more… I don’t know,” she ponders, then adds with a smile, “I think I’m making things more complicated for myself.”

The Smooth Operator is on view at the Reykjavík Art Museum (Hafnarhús) until March 8.