Helena ALMEIDA: Inhabited drawings / Desenhos habitados

27 March - 22 May 2015 London
Overview

Richard Saltoun Gallery announces a solo exhibition of the acclaimed and influential post-war Portuguese artist, Helena Almeida, marking the artist's UK debut. The exhibition presents a selection of works from some of her most iconic series from the 1970s and 1980s. 

 

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 the title of her exhibition suggests, 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.

 

Works
Installation Views
Press release


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).

 

Born in Funchal, Madeira Island, in 1930, Castro attended the School of Fine Arts, Lisbon, where she studied painting, before moving to Paris in 1958. From the outset of her career, she has worked with found objects, which she represents through light and its positive and negative. Recent exhibitions include: Museu Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto (2010); Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB), Lisbon (2001); Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (1992). She represented Portugal in the 1998 São Paulo Biennale.

Download Press Release
Back to Past exhibitions