Required fields are marked *. Helena Almeida is a Portuguese multi-disciplinary artist best known for her performances regarding the body and its relationship to painting. Helena Almeida (B. The work of Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 1934) insists upon a kind of litany: my painting is my body, my work is my body. Surrounded by radical politics during that decade, Almeida’s work would be impoverished if limited to the world of formalism. Dora Garcia Has Many Names: The Artist on the Revolutionary Potential of Three Works Across a Pandemic, The White Pube on “What’s Changed, and What Should?” – Ep. Your email address will not be published.

The work is never finished, it must always be redone. The work of Helena Almeida, a key figure in the aesthetic renovation of Portuguese art since the 1970s, is rendered unclassifiable by its particular combination of photography, painting and performance. Almeida’s pacesetting objects revel in shared experience to invert the Renaissance trope of painting as a window into another realm. Almeida has represented Portugal in the Venice Biennale (1982, 2005) and her work is part of numerous collections such as Tate Modern, MACBA, and MoMA. The dominant theme throughout Ameida's career has been her own body appearing in meticulously planned situations.

It’s the most energetic blue I could make and simultaneously associate with space.

Represented by internationally reputable galleries. Have a similar piece for sale? Helena Almeida (B. 24, Helena Almeida: My work is my body, my body is my work, The Picture of Terror: Contemporary Art and the Islamic State, For Common and Decent Things: Resisting Co-opted “Collaboration”, Interview: Emerging (and Rising) Artist Ajay Kurian’s Futures Long Since Passed, Blood and Paper: Zarina and the Currencies of Violence in India, Abstraction Made Political: Helena Almeida Rewrites Her Own History in Portugal – Momus | MyLuso.com, Abigail Deville Unburies Bodies at The Contemporary - Momus, A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Professional: Joseph Hartman’s Artist Studios. Helena Almeida’s black-and-white photographs of herself depict performances and various actions inflicted upon canvases, color, and other art objects. He is the Director of the Yeh Art Gallery at St. John's University, and has published with ArtReview, Momus, frieze, Artforum, CURA., and Art & Education, among other outlets. The artist’s concrete and physical body is constantly diverted, disfigured, concealed by shapes that may prolong or spill it, move “in” and “out” of it, cover or reveal it, as happens with this blue curtain-like shape of painting, grabbed by the hands which first painted it. To this day, Almeida produces and performs in the studio of her father, Leopoldo de Almeida, who was one of the Salazar regime’s preeminent sculptors of monuments.

It had to be a color that related to these two concepts: energy and space.”* Her work is like a permanent appearance of a woman’s image that transforms itself into painting or drawing, which is itself painting. There was no distinction between the canvas, the dimension of the canvas, and me. 500 - 0 Session. The five photographs from this set are documents of Almeida’s mature practice: private performances conducted in her studio. The Desenhos habitados combine photography and drawing (“the drawing of a drawing”, as the artist puts it), playing with real and virtual space, questioning the viewer’s dimensional perspective.

Likewise, photography reveals itself as medium, for it enables (and motivates) the use of series, meta-narratives, of fleeting moments, some almost fictional, marking the different “times” of movement.

Hammer Price Register to access this information. She paints vibrant colors onto many of her photographs, and attaches objects to others, forcing the depicted events into dialogue with the surface and transforming the past action or performance into something perpetually ongoing and present.