Helena Almeida

Helena Almeida was an influential Portuguese Post-war artist who grew up under the right-wing regime of Antonio Salazar. She predominantly worked with photography, performance, painting and drawing to question the traditional portrayals of women in art history. Her work is associated with the body art movement where she used her body as a vessel to drive conversations around identity and gender.

Her interests in the body as an artistic language started at a young age where she grew up modelling for her father, Leopoldo de Almeida’s sculptures. At the age of twenty-one she enrolled on the painting course at Lisbon’s Fine Art School, graduating in 1955.

She was awarded a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 1964 and moved to Paris where she started rejecting the traditional art constricts, weaving drawing, photography and performance into her paintings. This period of her life also marked the start of lifelong collaboration between herself, and her husband Artur Rosa, an architect who documented her performances.

In her art she often interacts with household objects and furniture, creating private, choreographed performances, primarily taking place in her studio, the same one that she modelled in for her father.

In a sequence of images called Study for Inner Improvement shepaints blue over her mouth as if she is eating it. The colour is undeniably similar to painter Yves Klein’s recognisable blue, someone who Almeida has voiced her dislike for his objectification of women in his artworks. By eating the paint it becomes an act of liberation and defiance for the women and artists in the male dominated art world of the seventies.

Helena Almeida is considered to be one the greatest Portuguese contemporary artists, representing her country twice at the Venice Biennale, and was heavily involved in the Portuguese art scene right up until her death in 2018.

By Hattie Alwen