EXHIBITION
HELENA ALMEIDA
MY WORK IS MY BODY,
MY BODY IS MY WORK
17 OCT 2015 — 10 JAN 2016
Helena Almeida, Saída negra [Black Exit], 1995 (detail). 5 B/w photographs. 71 x 48 cm (each)
Coll. Norlinda and José Lima on long term loan to Núcleo de Arte da Oliva Creative Factory
Photo: Aníbal Lemos, courtesy Núcleo de Arte da Oliva Creative Factory
English
Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 1934) has been
producing work since the 1960s in which
the importance of the body — registering,
occupying and defining space — and its
performative encounter with the world
have been central concerns. With over
eighty works in painting, photography, video, and drawing, this exhibition
brings together the photographic series
for which the artist is best known with
rarely seen works from throughout her
pioneering artistic career.
Almeida’s early abstract paintings, presented in the first galleries of the exhibition, introduce main themes in her
work, namely the interest in addressing the limits of pictorial and narrative
space. A series of untitled canvases from
1968–69 reveal a process of confronting
traditional artistic media and the language of painting. The artist rolls up the
canvas, hanging it as a window shade; or
displays it as a soft structure, undressing or collapsing under its own weight;
or turns its surface translucent, revealing the underlying stretcher-bars. In
additional works from the same series,
the canvas is dislocated from its frame,
while coloured canvases hang from a
transparent bag extending from another
painting, like detritus or leftovers.
‘I started off with a familiar language. (…)
I wasn’t going to create abstract art and
little by little all those elements started
coming out of the picture. After that, the
canvas started to destroy itself. It was a
kind of destruction, a need to put an end
to painting (…) like a window opening,
a blind being pulled up, a canvas being
pulled. (…) I say the destruction of the
painting because the canvas ended up
being anthropomorphic. It ended up
identifying itself with me.’1
Tela habitada [Inhabited Canvas] (1976)
extends Almeida’s confrontation with
the painting to her own body, introducing a performative dimension to her
work. While these paintings, many in
the Serralves Collection, survive, much
of Almeida’s early work is either lost
or its location is unknown. These are
represented in the exhibition through
photographic reproduction and archive
documents.
In the late 1960s, Almeida started to produce a series of sculptural drawings by
applying horsehair string to works on paper or cardboard. These drawings leap out
of the paper to project outside, making
the drawing three-dimensional and tangible as it invades the space of the viewer.
They are part of a series that was to last
throughout the following decade. As the
artist explains, ‘I never made my peace
with the canvas with paper or with any
other medium. I think that what has made
me break away from the medium, through
volumes, threads and many other means,
was always a huge dissatisfaction regarding the issues of space. By either confronting, or denying them, they have been the
one true constant in all my works. I would
not be far from the truth by saying that I
paint painting and draw drawing’.2
The introduction of photography into
Almeida’s work in the 1970s allowed for
an exploration of the gap between inner
subjective states and their visible outer
form. The transformation of the thread
into a line (Desenhos habitados [Inhabited
Drawings]), the inscription of a blue brush
stroke onto a photograph (Pinturas habitadas [Inhabited Paintings] and Estudos
para um enriquecimento interior [Studies
for Inner Improvement]) or the act of
putting on the canvas itself represent an
‘Conversation between Helena Almeida and María
de Corral’, in Helena Almeida, exh. cat., Santiago
de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, 2000, pp. 171–72.
2.
1.
Helena Almeida quoted in Isabel Carlos, in Helena
Almeida: Dias quase tranquilos, Lisbon: Caminho,
2005, p. 13.
action, a mark, a register of presence.
Regarding the choice of the colour blue,
the artist stated ‘I use blue because it’s
a spatial colour. If I used green or yellow,
it would be a disaster. Or brown. It has to
be blue. I sometimes use red: it’s a colour
that has other meanings, it has weight. I
use it when I don’t want to make space. I
use blue to show space. Or when I open my
mouth, I put blue there. It’s really space, it’s
swallowing the painting. It’s putting space
in the painting. It’s grabbing the painting…
It has to be blue’.3
In the late 1970s, Almeida’s images become directly emotive and sensorial in
the series Ouve-me [Hear Me] (1978–
80), Sente-me [Feel Me] (1979), Vê-me
[See Me] (1979) and A casa [The House]
(1979). The words ‘hear me’ are seen as
if stitched into the artist’s lips; images
of the artist gagged, sutured or stifled
by a canvas, against which she presses her mouth and hands. In her sound
piece Vê-me, Almeida recorded the
sound produced while drawing; the goal
was ‘not to make a descriptive recording of an action but rather to give the
feeling of space in movement, entering
and being within the vibrant zones of
the drawing, becoming one with it and
forming a physical space, manipulated,
divided, cut, full and empty.’4
In the 1980s and 1990s, a change in format and scale introduces the human figure at near life size, its movements and
expression reduced to a black outline or
shadow, such as in Dentro de mim [Inside
Me] (1995–98). In drawings and photographs, this human figure marks its presence and casts its shadow as thick black
pigment that draws diagonal lines on the
floor; the hands and feet drag along traces
of painting in the studio’s emptied space.
The 2006 series O abraço [The Embrace]
reveals two figures with their backs to the
viewer, twisting each other in the confined,
limited space of a stool. In these works,
Artur Rosa, Almeida’s husband and lifelong collaborator appears for the first time
in front of the camera. On this subject, the
artist says that ‘he is another space. He is
what was outside of me.5
Helena Almeida in conversation with Marta
Moreira de Almeida and João Ribas, ‘An Unfinished
Conversation’, in Helena Almeida: My Work is My Body,
My Body is My Work, exh. cat., Porto: Fundação de
Serralves, Paris: Jeu de Paume, Brussels: WIELS, 2015.
4.
Helena Almeida, Vê-me, 1979, audio recording
(32 min) and text.
5.
3.
Text by Rita Martins, Museum Educator
Helena Almeida, ‘An Unfinished Conversation’,
op. cit.
BIOGRAPHY
Helena Almeida was born in Lisbon in 1934. She studied Painting
at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts and has been exhibiting her
work regularly since the late 1960s. From the very beginning
of her career, Almeida has explored and questioned traditional
media, particularly painting, constantly seeking to break away
from the pictorial plane. The works displayed in her first solo
show (Galeria Buchholz, Lisbon, 1967) already revealed a critical
exercise on painting: whilst showing that which, in a painting,
is supposed to be hidden, the artist investigates the corporeal
and the materiality of painting’s traditional support, the canvas. Recent international exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
(2009) Fundación Telefónica, Madrid (2009), The Drawing
Centre, New York the Sydney Biennial (2004) and Centro Galego
de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela (2000), have
brought greater recognition of this artist’s significance both in
relation to Portuguese art but in a wider international context.
Almeida has represented Portugal twice at the Venice Biennale
in 1982 and 2005. Her work is included in a large number of public and private collections both in Portugal and abroad.
Entrance to the exhibition
ATRIUM
Bookshop
PÁTIO DA ADELINA
Entrance to the Museum
Floor 3
PROGRAMME
GUIDED TOURS
Screening of Helena Almeida: Pintura
habitada [Helena Almeida: Inhabited
Painting] introduced by Joana
Ascenção, film director
With Sónia Borges, Museum Educator
Portugal, 2006, colour, 50’
14 NOV (SAT), 6 pm
Auditorium
With João Ribas and Marta Moreira de
Almeida, Curators of the exhibition
The film Pintura habitada focus on the
various stages and elements involved in
the meticulous creative process through
which Helena Almeida builds her works,
from initial studies to exhibiting the finished
works, showcasing how the body (the
hands are a crucial example) ‘inhabits’ her
painting, her photographs and her videos.
The film was sponsored by the Instituto das Artes /
Ministério da Cultura, The Luso-American Development
Foundation and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
I was here, Conference-demonstration
by João Fiadeiro, choreographer
28 NOV (SAT), 4 pm
Museum Galleries / Auditorium
João Fiadeiro’s conference–performance
I was here visits the universe of Helena
Almeida. Between performance and
document, I was here illustrates — through
films, photographs, texts, models, brief
demonstrations — an encounter with the
artist’s work.
25 OCT (SUN), 12 pm
Museum Galleries
Exclusive for Members
05 NOV (THU), 7.30 pm
Museum Galleries
With João Pedro Vale, Artist
05 DEC (SAT), 5 pm
Museum Galleries
With Raquel Correia, Museum Educator
13 DEC (SAT), 12 pm
Museum Galleries
With João Ribas and Marta Moreira de
Almeida, Curators of the exhibition
10 JAN (SUN), 12 pm
Museum Galleries
FAMILIES AT SERRALVES
Workshop: ‘Here, My Body is Painting
and Drawing’
25 OCT (SUN), 10 am
With Cristina Camargo — Oficinas de Artes, Lda,
Museum Educator
Education Room (Museum)
Workshop: ‘Imaginary Painting’
01 NOV (SUN), 10 am
With Rita Faustino, Museum Educator
Education Room (Museum)
Workshop: ‘Threadbare Drawings’
15 NOV (SUN), 10 am
With Raquel Correia and Sónia Borges,
Museum Educators
Education Room (Museum)
CHRISTMAS AT SERRALVES
Workshop: ‘Imaginary Painting’
06 and 19 DEC (SUN) 10 am — 5 pm
With Rita Faustino, Museum Educator
Education Room (Museum)
‘Helena Almeida: My Work is My Body, My Body is My Work’ is co-produced by the
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Jeu de Paume, Paris, and WIELS,
Brussels.
Curators: Marta Moreira de Almeida and João Ribas
Registration and transport: Daniela Oliveira
Exhibition design advisors: Ana Maio, R2 Design
Installation team: João Brites, Ricardo Dias, Carlos Lopes, Manuel Martins,
Adelino Pontes, Lázaro Silva
Video: Carla Pinto
Sound: Nuno Aragão
Light: Rui Barbosa
Education: Denise Pollini (Head of Education), Diana Cruz, Cristina Lapa
In association with the exhibition ‘Helena Almeida: My Work is My Body, My Body is
My Work’ at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, from 17 October until 13
December 2015 the Teatro Nacional São João presents in its Salão Nobre Helena
Almeida’s Untitled 1994–95, a work specifically conceived for the artist’s exhibition
at the Serralves Villa in 1995 and part of the Serralves Collection since then.
Institutional Support
Exclusive Sponsor of the Exhibition
Exclusive Sponsor of the Museum
Seguradora Oficial: Fidelidade — Companhia de Seguros, S.A.
Fundação de Serralves / Rua D. João de Castro, 210 . 4150—417 Porto / www.serralves.pt / [email protected] / Information: 808 200 543
PARK Entrance by Largo D. João III (next to École française)