Monday blues. Portuguese artist Helena Almeida is perhaps best known for her series of black-and-white self-portraits, in which she appears to playfully manipulate swathes of bright blue paint à la Yves Klein (the pigment was actually added afterwards). This image is taken from Inhabited Painting, her first series in this vein, and sees the artist painting over her own face in a mirror. Almeida has always denied any deliberate link between her own work and Klein’s, but her early denouncement of Klein’s use of women as objects combined with her employment of this specific hue in images that reclaim the female body as their subject feels like a purposeful act of liberation.
