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Biografy

Lisbon (Portugal), 1934

With a degree in painting from the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes in Lisbon, Helena Almeida is the daughter of the sculptor Leopoldo de Almeida, mother of the artist Joana Rosa, and wife of Artur Rosa, architect and sculptor who also takes her photographs. For more than thirty years, the artistic career of this Portuguese artist has been confirmed as the bearer of an expressive language in which diverse disciplines and attitudes converge. Although she is usually considered a photographer, her work is closely related to other areas of fine art, such as painting and sculpture, due to the meticulous process of elaboration of the images as well as the employment of pigments and complementary materials in these productions.

Her creative discourse is based on self-representation. The works are not mere self-portraits, for the artist always appears as model, staging distinct facets of her life: as author or mother, making visual statements about her personal doubts. Her compositions usually consist of sequenced scenes staged in a filmic fashion, with set up spaces where Almeida manages to pinpoint her subjectivity.

Despite deploying her own body -and the personal experience implied therein- as the basis of her work, there is no place in Almeida's art for autobiographical tales. Instead, she demonstrates her physiognomy as her sole media and means of communication (Ouve-me, 1979). The artist and her body are always the protagonists: their forms, their postures and their relationships with the objects in her studio are the principle categories of interaction employed (O Atelier, 1983). This self-representation through the photographic language is ultimately meant as an exploration of the limits of representation; we ought to keep in mind that her origins coincide with the boom of performance art and the debate regarding conceptual art.

Despite deploying her own body -and the personal experience implied therein- as the basis of her work, there is no place in Almeida's art for autobiographical tales. Instead, she demonstrates her physiognomy as her sole media and means of communication (Ouve-me, 1979). The artist and her body are always the protagonists: their forms, their postures and their relationships with the objects in her studio are the principle categories of interaction employed (O Atelier, 1983). This self-representation through the photographic language is ultimately meant as an exploration of the limits of representation; we ought to keep in mind that her origins coincide with the boom of performance art and the debate regarding conceptual art.

The artist occasionally becomes a great black stain (Espaço espesso, 1982; Negro Agudo, 1983) or her body allows itself to be polluted by colourful brushstrokes dirtying her figure (Perdao, 1993). Her images, then, are born of painting, a discipline with which she experimented during the decade of the seventies in order to conclude by identifying the picture-object with the author in works such as Desenho Habitado or Pintura Habitada, both from 1975. Despite her more than evident relation with performance and body-art, the artist subjects her entire creative process to a preconceived image, producing meticulous sketches prior to settling on the desired representation. What we contemplate is only the result of a complex action that very likely involves a long and careful elaboration.
A. S.