Abstract
Born in 1947, Portuguese artist Helena Almeida has been slowly but steadily building a reputation over the past decades, not only at home but also abroad. Such success has been grounded in a critical analysis of her work that has emphasized its formal characteristics, namely its depurated, ascetic nature, its avoidance of personal and confessional details and its combination of different media (painting, photography, performance, film, dance), resulting in a deeply meta-referential oeuvre. In this article, I question this dominant assessment of Almeida’s work and the modernist, formalist contours of that analysis by discussing the presence of the (woman) artist, her body and its interaction with paint within the work of art from a gendered perspective. My analysis will concomitantly highlight the connections between Almeida and other women artists working around the same period; it will also unveil the presence of the semiotic in terms that associate this dimension with female liminality. By radically changing the stance of the critical discourse on Almeida’s work, the article eventually endeavors to justify why Almeida may successfully be inserted in a counter art history of women’s dialogue with and subversion of an inherently masculine canon.
Resumo
Abstract
Born in 1947, Portuguese artist Helena Almeida has been slowly but steadily building a reputation over the past decades, not only at home but also abroad. Such success has been grounded in a critical analysis of her work that has emphasized its formal characteristics, namely its depurated, ascetic nature, its avoidance of personal and confessional details and its combination of different media (painting, photography, performance, film, dance), resulting in a deeply meta-referential oeuvre. In this article, I question this dominant assessment of Almeida’s work and the modernist, formalist contours of that analysis by discussing the presence of the (woman) artist, her body and its interaction with paint within the work of art from a gendered perspective. My analysis will concomitantly highlight the connections between Almeida and other women artists working around the same period; it will also unveil the presence of the semiotic in terms that associate this dimension with female liminality. By radically changing the stance of the critical discourse on Almeida’s work, the article eventually endeavors to justify why Almeida may successfully be inserted in a counter art history of women’s dialogue with and subversion of an inherently masculine canon.
- © 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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