20/02/2026
New item in our museum collection:
🔵 Helena Almeida, Exhibition poster for 'Inside Me' (2009), Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge 🔵
Helena Almeida (1934-2018) was an influential Portuguese post-war artist who grew up under the right-wing regime of Antonio Salazar. She predominantly worked with photography, performance, painting and drawing to question the traditional portrayals of women in art history. Her work is associated with the body art movement where she used her body as a vessel to drive conversations around identity and gender.
In a sequence of images called 'Study for Inner Improvement', she paints blue over her mouth as if she is eating it. The colour is undeniably similar to painter Yves Klein’s recognisable blue, someone who Almeida has voiced her dislike for his objectification of women in his artworks. By 'eating the paint', it becomes an act of liberation and defiance for women artists in the male dominated art world of the seventies.
