Helena Almeida

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.