Patrícia Almeida

Lisboa, 1970 – Lisboa, 2017

Patrícia Almeida’s photography emerged from her interest in romantic literature, pop-rock music and urban counter-cultures, an experiential and aesthetic repertoire that determined the setting of her images. An attentive observer of contemporary reality and open to its sensory experience, she made extensive documentary series of great plastic consistency and intense subjectivity.Patrícia Almeida’s photography emerged from her interest in romantic literature, pop-rock music and urban counter-cultures, an experiential and aesthetic repertoire that determined the setting of her images. An attentive observer of contemporary reality and open to its sensory experience, she made extensive documentary series of great plastic consistency and intense subjectivity.

She became interested in the urban imaginary, focusing on architecture, public spaces, lifestyles, people and gestures that were at once specific and global. In “Portobello” she captures the iconography underlying the phenomenon of the mass summer tourism that occurs in seaside resorts in the Algarve region of southern Portugal, imbuing it with an almost commercial exoticism and revealing stereotypes and consumerist aspirations: the standardised settings, the programmatic happiness of families, the eroticisation of young tanned bodies.

Developed in music festivals, “All Beauty Must Die” portrays the idyllic atmosphere of youth, its drive towards the tragic and melancholic, its irreverence and freedom, its candour and bewilderment.

Reacting to encounters that are sometimes spontaneous and at other times provoked, Patrícia Almeida created bodies of images that rub up against and speculate on the border between the real and the unreal, the documental and the fictional, the political and the poetic.

Lígia Afonso
[Plano Nacional das Artes and Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian]
Curator, teacher and researcher born in Lisbon in 1981
Text originally written for Google Arts & Culture apropos the exhibition “All I Want, Portuguese Women Artists from 1900 to 2020”, curated by Helena de Freitas and Bruno Marchand
Portrait
© PA