Spotlight on Helena Almeida at Galeria Francisco Fino (Frieze Masters)

At Frieze Masters 2025, Galeria Francisco Fino’s Spotlight presentation focuses on Portuguese artist Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 1934 – Sintra, 2018), whose work continues to pulse with an energy that refuses the confines of medium or category.

Born and based in Lisbon, Almeida’s practice traversed painting, drawing, performance, video, installation, and photography, each medium absorbed and transformed by the presence of her own body. The selection of works from the 1970s, many drawn from the artist’s studio, charts the evolution of a language: lines that extend beyond paper, gestures that pierce the photographic frame, colour that becomes space.

In her 1970 drawings, vertical lines delicately painted on laminated paper erupt into real space, their extensions, made of horsehair, projecting toward the viewer. These works defy the flatness of the picture plane, rendering the line simultaneously graphic and sculptural. “It was the drawings with horsehair that brought me the need to be photographed,” Almeida would later recall. “I wanted to hold the line with my fingers… to demonstrate that it had been freed from the paper.” This moment marks a profound shift: from the conceptual rigor of drawing to a performative terrain where the artist’s own body becomes the site and substance of the work.

By 1975, in series such as Desenho Habitado (Inhabited Drawing) and Pintura Habitada (Inhabited Painting), Almeida appears within black-and-white photographs, their surfaces intervened by vivid blue, black, or red acrylic gestures. These are not self-portraits but enactments, performances of becoming in which the artist’s presence is both revealed and withheld. As Isabel Carlos writes, Almeida’s blue is a matter of energy and space, “the most energetic blue I could make,” she said, “a colour that relates to both concepts.” The body, meanwhile, is never fixed: it spills beyond its own contours, merges with pigment, or dissolves into the act of creation.

For Almeida, photography is a temporal intersection where the past gesture invades the present, as Delfim Sardo notes, “clarifying the temporal difference between both moments on the same instant it implodes in the present.” Whether holding a brush, stretching a canvas, or wearing one as a suit in Inhabited Canvas (1977), Almeida enacts a choreography of becoming that is as calculated as it is charged with emotion. “I am not myself, I am not the other, I am something in between,” she echoes the poet Mário de Sá-Carneiro.

In these works, Helena Almeida collapses the boundaries between painting, photography, performance, and sculpture. Galeria Francisco Fino’s presentation at Frieze Masters renews the power of her declaration: my work is my body, my body is my work, a living, pulsating truth that continues to inhabit the space between image and experience.