Frieze Masters Spotlight: Helena Almeida

Galeria Francisco Fino’s participation in Frieze Masters – Spotlight, London, 2025, is dedicated to presenting a representative selection of works by Helena Almeida from the 1970s.

Drawn mostly from Helena Almeida’s studio holdings, this set of works is rare and characteristic of her career and creative process, encompassing photography inhabited by painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, performance, and above all by her body and her senses.

Her hands, her mouth, her face, her whole body were to be worked on throughout her career and successively incorporated into her work although never as self-portraiture or as a staging or dramatization of other characters or figures but always as the reiterated presence of herself.

The artist’s own body is constantly obscured, disfigured, hidden by the painted marks which at times extend it, at other times spill over it, ‘enter’ or ‘exit’ it, without ever resorting to masks, accessories, or artificial sets. Clothed in the most neutral of garments, she is photographed in her studio with a minimum of elements, following a concept manifest through drawing.

Much like the separations between artistic genres, the boundaries between the five senses are thwarted in order to stress the plurality of sensory experience, creating unease and placing us on the threshold of sensations and languages that carry a strong communicative appeal.

From minimalism to conceptualism, from performance to photography, Helena Almeida’s work addresses all the major artistic movements that have left a mark from the second half of the Twentieth-century to the present, though in a way that is never derivative but always deeply inventive and personal, creating a vocabulary and inventing a world without parting from her references. In fact, the recurrence not only of series but also of the same title-concepts with which she titled her works over the years confirms this. In her own words: “I move around in circles; the cycles return. The work is never complete, it has to be redone. What interests me is always the same: the space, the house, the ceiling, the corner, the floor; then, the physical space of the canvas, but what I want is to deal with emotions.”

In her drawings of the 1970s she used horsehair to grant three-dimensionality to her drawings’ lines. In her photographs of the early 2000s, her body was transformed into a sculpture to which mirrors were appended or was made to carry objects. In her exploration of painting, she favoured the colour blue, a mixture of cobalt and ultramarine blue that for her signified energy.

These private, performative acts, conceived in preparatory drawings that are true storyboards for actions, recorded in black and white in her studio, with closeness and intimacy, and rigorously and forthrightly edited and printed, result in these works that are as unique as they are universal.

Isabel Carlos, Lisbon 2025

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