Helena Almeida, Experimental Artist From Portugal, Dies at 84

Helena Almeida, a Portuguese artist who used drawing, painting, photography, performance and more to create works that bent the boundaries between genres and suggested themes of repression and emancipation, died Sept. 25 in Sintra, Portugal. She was 84.

The Galeria Filomena Soares in Lisbon, which represented her, confirmed her death. The cause was not given.

Almeida was well known in her home country for half a century, but in the past two decades she received increasing attention abroad as well. The Tate Modern in London currently has an exhibition of her works.

Her signature technique was to use herself in carefully constructed photographs, videos and performance works — sometimes her whole body, sometimes just her lower torso, her legs, or an arm — but not in the conventional terms of self-portraiture.

“I turn myself into a drawing,” she said by way of describing her art. “My body as a drawing, myself as my own work.”

On his official website, Portugal’s president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, called Almeida “a unique artist” who was “deeply original and rightly recognized throughout the world.”

Although she left behind countless pieces of art, some in leading museums, “we will always think that we had little time to admire the work and life of Helena Almeida,” he said.

Almeida was born in Lisbon in 1934 — her gallery did not have a birthdate — into an art-conscious household: Her father was Leopoldo de Almeida, a noted sculptor. He sometimes used her as a model.

“And what I learned from him was a work schedule: how necessary it is to work, hours upon hours, in environments in which you have to stop feeling the body,” she said.

Her father made the compromises necessary to create art during nearly 40 years of dictatorship under Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar. Among the public projects he was involved in is the formidable “Monument to the Discoveries,” a nationalistic work celebrating Portugal’s Age of Exploration, created in 1939 and then rebuilt by others in 1960 out of less perishable materials.

Almeida studied at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, earning a degree in painting, and had her first solo exhibition at the Galeria Buchholz in Lisbon in 1967.

When her father died in 1975, she inherited his studio in Lisbon, and it became an integral part of her work, a place for experimentation that was steeped in her personal history. By then she had already established herself as an artist eager to expand the boundaries of the traditional canvas.

Early in her career Almeida was struck by the work of Italian artist Lucio Fontana, particularly his practice of slashing his canvases, which suggested an escape from two-dimensionality.

She began playing with that idea as well, combining photography and performance with painting. An early example was “Pink Canvas for Wearing” (1969), in which she dressed in a sort of wearable canvas and affixed a blank rectangular canvas to her front, as if taking it for a stroll in the garden.

The piece was one of her earliest uses of photography, which she came to rely on, her husband, architect Artur Rosa, working the camera as she performed an artwork, a genre sometimes labeled photoconceptualism.

Some of her best-known works were black-and-white photographs of herself with blue paint added — across her face, for instance, or coming out of her mouth. The color was reminiscent of that used by French artist Yves Klein, and Almeida’s works were sometimes interpreted as a response to his practice of using nude female models as “living brushes,” which was criticized as dehumanizing and a symptom of the male domination of the art world.

If some critics gave her works a feminist reading, she shied away from attaching such direct meanings.

“I use blue because it’s a spatial color,” she said. “I use blue to show space.”

Late in her career, her husband — or his limbs — made it into some of the photographs along with herself.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

Almeida’s work was part of numerous group shows, including “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” which originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and later came to MoMA PS1 in Queens. She represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale twice, in 1982 and 2005. Her many solo exhibitions included “Work Is Never Finished,” seen last year at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Almeida’s recent photographs, the institute’s description of that show read, “remind us that we are all shape shifters — and that our bodies can be revealed to us anew with every considered action.”