Helena Almeida

Biography

“My work is my body, my body is my work.” Almeida repeated this formula so often that it came to overshadow everything else, and yet it is worth beginning with more modest things: her father’s studio and the few years when she hardly worked.

She was born in Lisbon in 1934, the daughter of the sculptor Leopoldo de Almeida (1898–1975). In 1955 she completed the painting course at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts. By then she was already married to the architect Artur Rosa and raising children, so the following years went to her family. Their daughter Joana Rosa also became an artist.

In 1964 Almeida won a scholarship and moved to Paris.

Her first solo exhibition took place in 1967 at the Galeria Buchholz in Lisbon. Already there one can see the devices she would return to: she turned the structure of a painting inside out, putting the wooden stretcher and grille at the front, and added three-dimensional elements such as a blind and a shutter. The canvas was no longer to be a flat surface. Critics see in this a dismantling of the very logic of painting, and I think that reading is right: she was not depicting objects but taking the picture apart. The gallery showed her work again in 1968 and 1969. From 1969 her own body appears in her work. In a black-and-white photograph she stands with a canvas on her, arms spread and head lowered, like Christ carrying the cross. Her wish, as she put it, was to erase the distance between body and work. She did not regard these works as self-portraits, and scholars agree with her: they tell us nothing about the artist’s actual appearance or character. Nor is there any theatricality in them; she does not play other characters.

In the early 1970s Almeida turned to drawing and began to use horsehair. The thread gave the line volume, and the drawing seemed to leap off the sheet. She herself called this “painting outwards”. The question then passed to painting: blue and red patches gained independence, filled the mouth, spread over the hands. In the series “Inhabited Canvases” (1975–1977) paint is clasped in the palms, enters the mouth or runs down as a tear. In 1976 she said that she thought she was close to the truth in claiming that she painted painting and drew drawing. From 1975 photography, painting and drawing merged into a single practice in which her body served as the first support. Drawing was marked by the strands of hair, painting by blue, red and sometimes black, and photography acted as a kind of narrative about it all. It is hard to judge her works as separate genres: some saw in them a performance captured in a single instant, others body art.

Later, sculpture and performance came to the fore, and the subject became the relation of the body to space, above all the space of the studio. In “Inside Me” (2001) she attached a narrow vertical mirror to her body, and in the series “Flying” of the same year she tested the same wish to go beyond physical limits with irony and play, now subjecting the wish itself to self-criticism. Of the outcome she said: “I go round in circles, the cycles return. The work is never finished.” She was interested in the house, the ceiling, the corner, the floor, and then the space of the canvas.

Almeida represented Portugal at the São Paulo Biennial (1979), the Venice Biennale (1982 and 2005) and the Sydney Biennale (2004). Her solo exhibitions include Charleroi (1991), the Serralves Foundation in Porto (1995), Santiago de Compostela (2000), the Drawing Center in New York (2004), Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge and the Fundación Telefónica in Madrid (2009). The large retrospective “My Work Is My Body, My Body Is My Work” was shown in 2015–2016 at the Serralves Museum, then in Paris and Brussels; in 2017 the exhibition “Work Is Never Finished” opened at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her works are in the collections of Tate Modern in London and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Her prizes include first prize for drawing in Coimbra (1969), prizes at the Tokyo Biennale and at the Vila Nova de Cerveira Biennale (1984), a prize from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (1984), and the BESphoto and AICA prizes (both 2004). On 9 June 2003 she was made a Grand Officer of the Order of Prince Henry.

In 2018 at Tate Modern her “Inhabited Canvas” and the series “Drawing (with Pigment)” were shown in a room devoted to the relation between the individual and the work of art. Almeida died on 25 September 2018 at her home in Sintra.