MY WORK IS MY BODY, MY BODY IS MY WORK

HELENA ALMEIDA

 

On the occasion of the exhibition, a catalog was published. The artist's work process and the place of her work in the context of Portuguese art and feminist and performing arts practices from the 1970s and subsequent decades will be explored in the unpublished essays by Peggy Phelan (Professor of Theater and Performance and English at Stanford University), Connie Buttler (Chief Curator of the Hammer Museum at the University of Los Angeles) and Bernardo Pinto de Almeida (historian and art critic, Full Professor at Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto) and in an interview with the artist conducted by the curators of the exhibition, João Ribas and Marta Moreira de Almeida.

 

Dedicated to the work of the renowned Portuguese artist Helena Almeida, examines her work in painting, photography, video and drawing over almost five decades. The exhibition will highlight the importance of the body - which registers, occupies and defines space - and its performative encounter with the world in the works carried out by the artist from the mid-1960s to the present. In addition to the "inhabited" paintings and photographic series for which she is best known, works rarely exhibited throughout her artistic career will be shown at the exhibition. Through her initial abstract painting, Helena Almeida introduces the central concerns that define her artistic practice in a diversity of disciplines, namely the interest in exceeding the limits of the pictorial and narrative space that has always played a fundamental role in the artist's work. As Helena Almeida says: "My painting is my body, my work is my body” .