LONDON.- Richard Saltoun Gallery announces a solo exhibition of the acclaimed and influential post-war Portuguese artist, Helena Almeida (b. Lisbon, 1934).
This is the first London show dedicated to Helena Almeida, one of the leading women artists working in Europe during the '70s and '80s. The exhibition presents a selection of works from some of her most iconic series from the period.
Almeida has twice represented Portugal at the Venice Biennial (1982 and 2005) and she will be the subject of a forthcoming touring retrospective at the Serralves Foundation, Porto (2015), Jeu de Paume, Paris (2016), Wiels, Bruxelles (2016) and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo (2017).
Throughout her career Almeida has continuously explored and questioned traditional media, breaking away from the pictorial plane by placing her body as the subject of her work - or as her titles suggest, by "inhabiting" them. Almeida's body, often clad in black, performs carefully choreographed movements in dialogue with simple, everyday objects.
The resulting photographic image is never purely representational, but blurred and grainy, and often interfered with by a drawn line, a paint-stroke, or a sculptural element such as horsehair: they exist beyond the limits of the 2-dimensional photographic surface through these interferences.
A presentation of works by Portuguese artist Lourdes Castro (b. Madeira, 1930) will also be exhibited. A contemporary of Almeida, Castro uses shadow and light as a means of representation. She has been the subject of two retrospective exhibitions at the Serralves Foundation (2003 and 2010).
Born in Lisbon in 1934, Ameida studied painting at the School of Fine Arts, Lisbon, and has been exhibiting her work extensively on an international scale since the late 1960s.
Recent exhibitions include: Fundación Telefónica, Madrid (2009), CAM - Centro de Arte Moderno, Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2006), The Drawing Centre, New York (2004), the Sydney Biennial (2004), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela (2000).
