To hold the line with my fingers. Helena Almeida

“If it were a story, it could be told like this: a spacious house with large doors and windows, in which the interior and exterior exist as extensions of each other, was occupied by a woman in a black dress. As she wandered through the various rooms of the house, the woman inscribed shadows and lights, cut-outs and figures, a black and white body occasionally smudged with blue or red”.[1]

Prats Nogueras Blanchard is delighted to announce To hold the line with my fingers, our inaugural exhibition of the work of Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 1934 – Sintra, 2018) in our Barcelona gallery. Almeida was one of the most important artists in contemporary Portuguese art and a decisive figure in its transformation from the 1970s onward. Throughout her career, she moved between painting, photography, drawing and performance, constantly exploring their limits. In her work, the body—her own—becomes a tool, a material and a language: a space in which gesture, image, and presence converge.

Following her early investigations into the rupture of the pictorial support in her late 1960s canvases, Helena Almeida deepened her exploration of the material conditions of the medium, producing a series of drawings made with horsehair thread on paper. Three works from this series open the exhibition. In these pieces, the line is not a stroke that describes, but rather an action that defines a place. It is an extension of the body—a way of inhabiting space. The line thus becomes a link between interior and exterior, between the pictorial plane and reality. Through this minimal and precise gesture, Almeida activates the space: the drawing opens up, the surface transforms into a stage, and the image ceases to be a representation and becomes a presence