Helena Almeida

Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 1934 – Sintra, 2018) completed the degree in Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon in 1955 and exhibited regularly since the late 1960s. Her first solo exhibition was in 1967 at Galeria Buchholz, in Lisbon.

Throughout her career, Helena Almeida questioned the traditional artistic media, in particular painting, a discipline from which she explored other disciplines, such as drawing, performance, video and photography. In her early works, the artist reflects on the materiality and limits of the pictorial space, working the canvas in an unconventional way, such as painting its back or adding everyday objects to it. Following those initial works, the artist found in photography the ideal medium to explore the tension between her work and her body, an ever-present theme in her artistic thinking that lead her to resort to self-representation, for which she became known nationally and internationally.

Helena Almeida represented Portugal at the Biennales of São Paulo (1979), Venice (1982 and 2004) and Sidney (2004) and had important solo exhibitions in Portugal and abroad.