Helena Almeida (Lisbon, Portugal, 1934 - Sintra, Portugal, 2018) studied painting at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes of Lisbon. She was awarded a scholarship from the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Paris in 1964, where she became more interested in cultural life than in academic life. In 1967 she held her first solo painting exhibition at the Buchholz Gallery, in Lisbon. The desire to escape from the canvas is evident in Helena Almeida's early works, where she tries to break with the limits of painting and leave the support, literally transgressing the limits of the space of the work of art.
Starting in 1975, Helena Almeida began to explore other disciplines such as drawing, photography, and video, viewing them as means to understand the relationship between the author's body and the space of the work. The artist's body becomes the support of her art, becoming both subject and object, not in the form of a self-portrait - the face is often hidden - but in the sense of "inhabiting the painting", of placing herself within her work, of being her work. In 1977, at the exhibition Alternativa Zero (a landmark exhibition in contemporary Portuguese art) she presented a series of photographs with elements attached to the image, thus creating the illusion of the work leaving its place and entering the space of the observer.
From the late 1970s onwards Helena Almeida gained international recognition. In the 1990s, the artist began to use photography as a means of choice for artistic creation, recording performative acts in a determined space - the studio that belonged to her father, the Portuguese sculptor Leopoldo de Almeida - in which she tried to overcome the limits of her own body. Her works gain scale and color - blue, red, or black, always loaded with meaning - that she paints on her photographs. Helena Almeida recognises her work as painting, using photography as a medium to present the result of her artistic work. Since then she has exhibited regularly: Fundação de Serralves, Porto, 1995; Austria, 2003; Madrid, 1998; Santiago de Compostela and New York, 2000; PHotoEspaña Prize, 2003; Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisboa, 2004. She represented Portugal at the São Paulo Biennial, Brazil, 1979, the Venice Biennial, 1982 and 2004, and the Sydney Biennial, 2004.
Retrieved from Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian's official website.
