The retrospective will inhabit the walls of Brussels’ former brewery turned contemporary art space for an exhibition organized in collaboration with the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal and Paris’ Jeu de Paume. Happening spoke to João Ribas, deputy director and senior curator of the Serralves Foundation.
“Helena Almeida is a legendary figure, one that we’ve had a long relationship with and that is part of our museum’s history” explains Ribas. “For us, it was time to reconsider her career in different ways. We went back to her very early works, some of which are pretty unknown, especially the early drawings from Helena’s archives.
The retrospective covers all the key moments of her career — including her Inhabited Paintings, certainly her most famous works. “We wanted to give a peek into not only Almeida’s works themselves but the whole creative process behind them — her work in practice so to speak. The retrospective encompasses a number of different media — drawing, photography, video, choreography — which reveal the artistic process preceding the creation of the artwork.”
Almeida’s 1969 work Untitled, a semi-clothed painting, revealing the wooden frame behind the canvas, is both a reminder of the limits of the artistic medium and a window to the future experimentations with painting, photography and performance that characterize her work.
Helena Almeida, Untitled (1968) and Vanishing Point (1982). Courtesy Jeu de Paume and Fundaçao de Serralves.
“What is extraordinary about WIELS”, says Ribao, “is the informality of its architecture, which makes the exhibition itself more informal and intimate; it resembles the studio space, suggesting a significant link with Almeida’s work”.
The studio is, indeed, key to Almeida’s practice. Her career began early on in her father’s studio, Leopoldo de Almeida — which she inherited following his death in 1975 — where she posed as a model. Years later, in the nineties, she brought her studio into her artistic practice, and her atelier progressively became a deeply theatrical space, further bringing down the barriers between performance and photography.
Her 1982 Ponto de Fuga (Vanishing Point) continues Almeida’s interdisciplinary discourse on the nature of art, also introducing the notion of the body — which becomes integral part of the artwork, with the artist growing increasingly more interested in the idea of self-representation. In this work, the artist’s tears down the photograph’s vanishing point in an act of rebellion against established conventions, which translates into the reappropriation of both the artwork’s surface and the artistic space.
“Jeu de Paume is an extraordinary museum in relation to the thinking and displaying of photography, so we focused on the photographic image,” says Ribao. “But WIELS is very different, it is an idea-driven institution, which tends to feature programs that revolve around an idea, a polemic. The exhibition in Brussels is not medium-specific and it is less about a set narrative and more about a specific approach and a set of interests, both aesthetic and theoretical, like the questions revolving around feminism, the idea of the body and the concept of performance.”
Helena Almeida, Seduce, 2005. Courtesy Jeu de Paume.
The size and the ambition of this retrospective allow to discover Alemida’s play with lines, colors and forms through painting, photography and video. “Everything informs everything else” concludes Ribao. “I wouldn’t say that curating the exhibition was a challenge, the work was coherent, and really goes to show her evolution and her contribution to contemporary art”.
The retrospective “Helena Almeida: Corpus” opens today at WIELS Brussels. The exhibition will run through December 11, 2016.
