My Work is My Body, My Body is My Work.
— Helena Almeida
Helena Almeida was born in Lisbon. She studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, graduating in 1955. She began exhibiting regularly in the late 1960s and, from her earliest works, set out to question traditional forms of expression—painting in particular—driven by a constant desire to push beyond the limits of the pictorial surface.
Over the decades, she developed a singular body of work that explores the boundaries of painting, transforming concepts and experiences into images. Her practice combines photography, drawing, and painting to interrogate the space and surface of the artwork, placing the body at the centre of both her conceptual inquiry and performative practice.
Considered one of the major figures of Portuguese contemporary art, Helena Almeida established herself in the 1970s within the fields of performance and conceptual art, participating in major international events such as the Venice Biennales in 1982 and 2005. In 2016, her work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
More recently, her work has continued to receive international recognition. In October 2025, the exhibition Helena Almeida: Habitar a Obra at the Amélia de Mello Foundation in Lisbon brought together works from the Serralves Collection, retracing key stages of her artistic practice. The same year, Frieze Masters in London presented, for the first time, previously unseen photographs from her 1970s–1980s series. Finally, in January 2026, the Macao Museum of Art dedicated its first large-scale retrospective of the artist in Asia, I Am Here – Presence and Resonance, presenting nearly 190 works and highlighting the lasting influence of her practice on contemporary approaches.