Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Seduzir [To Seduce]

Image caption
HELENA ALMEIDA

Seduzir [To Seduce]

  • 2002
  • Silver gelatine and acrylic on baryta paper
  • 195 x 126 cm
  • Cat. F_63
  • Acquired in 2002
By:
Isabel Tejeda

To Seduce (2002) by Helena Almeida is an autobiographical series closely related to the death of her sister. The artist recalls her as ‘elegant and fantastic’, a woman who never uttered a word of complaint, pain or suffering over the course of her illness, and who was always very well dressed: ‘When she was ill, I drew a great deal and the colour red was always present’.  Those drawings were the sketches for the photographs that the Portuguese artist would later take.

As is frequently the case in her work, the photograph belonging to the Banco de España Collection is large and in black-and-white; it shows the fragmented body of the artist from shoulders to feet and without revealing her identity. Almeida is dressed elegantly for the performance shoot. She is wearing a black knee-length coat and holding a corner of the hem as if dancing a minuet. Her high heels are a stereotyped symbol of femininity, but she has removed one of them, which is lying on the floor, and her bare sole leaves red footprints as she walks.  This blotch is the only touch of colour and acts as the photo’s punctum. Freed of any disguise, her foot shows the true emotions of the character depicted with its trace of vermilion paint, the artist’s conception of drama.

While this piece continues Almeida’s identification of her body with her work – a constant in her art since the 1960s –, she is being transformed here into someone else. She uses her own body to shoulder her lost sister’s pain, is embodied in her and metaphorically takes on that pain as her own. Even though she finds it convenient to be the model for her own works, she has said that it is a represented body: ‘[...] It is not me. It is though I were someone else. Fundamentally, it is the search for the other, the other that is there’.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Helena Almeida
Lisbon 1934 - Sintra 2018

Helena Almeida is the daughter of the sculptor Leopoldo de Almeida (1898-1975). She graduated in Painting from the Lisbon Fine Arts School in 1955 and would soon become one of the leading figures of the main group initiatives on the Portuguese art scene. Her first solo show was at the Buchholz Gallery in Lisbon in 1967. Her refusal to see painting conventionally and her need to explore the limits of the canvas could already be seen. This marked the start of a fruitful questioning of the medium based on photographic self-representation, in which she worked closely with her husband, the sculptor and architect Artur Rosa, who took the photographs. Almeida used drawing to plan that representation, in which visual media and performance combine but neither of them predominates. That is the case of her series entitled Inhabited Painting in the 1970s, where she makes viewers reflect upon fractures separating reality and representation and their place on a virtual plane in the postmodern world.

Helena Almeida took part in the São Paulo Biennial (1979), but it was not until the 1980s that her work received institutional recognition, with solo exhibitions such as the one at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon, 1983 and 1987). She represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale (1982) and exhibited at the Serralves Foundation (Oporto, Portugal, 1995). However, she did not achieve international acclaim until her work was shown in Spain at the Casa de América in Madrid, as the part of the ARCO event featuring Portuguese art in 1998. She then went on to exhibit at leading centres internationally, including the Centre for Contemporary Art of Galicia (Santiago de Compostela, 2000), the Ibero-American Museum of Contemporary Art (Badajoz, 2000), the Telefónica Foundation, (Madrid, 2008), the Belém Cultural Centre Foundation (Lisbon, 2004), the Serralves Foundation (Oporto, Portugal, 2015), the Jeu de Paume Gallery (Paris, 2016) and the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre (Brussels, 2015-2016).  Her work was also shown at the Sydney Biennial (2004) and the Venice Biennale (2005).

Roberto Díaz

 
«Pink Fabric to Wear» (Madrid, 2008-2009). «From Goya to our times. Perspectives of the Banco de España Collection», Musée Mohammed VI d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (Rabat, 2017-2018). «(UN)COMMON VALUES. Two Corporate Collections of Contemporary Art», National Bank of Belgium (Brussels, 2022).
Vv.Aa. Tela rosa para vestir, Madrid, Fundación Telefónica, 2008. Yolanda Romero & Isabel Tejeda De Goya a nuestros días. Miradas a la Colección Banco de España, Madrid & Rabat, AECID y FMN, 2017. Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2.