Archive

HElena Valsecchi

OPEN CLASS
NOVEMBER 27TH OF 2025, 10AM
ROOM 23 OF EP.2 – ESAD.CR

Starting from a body of work that does not set disciplinary limits, and that moves in the borderlands between drawing, sculpture, installation, painting and performance, I have identified and developed a unifying concept: with the Italian term Compenetrazione I define the movement that characterises my art practice, centred on the ambition to overcome the perception of division between bodies or elements.
This movement, activated and motivated by the peculiar intuition of the world awakened by the act of walking, manifests itself in every aspect of my artistic making and thinking, both in formal and conceptual terms. It determines, on the one hand, a definition of the figure of the artist as na intermediary between perception, knowledge and feeling, and, on the other, a reconfiguration or, possibly, circumvention of the concept of identity, necessarily taking it to a broader dimension.

Italian and portuguese artist, HElena Valsecchi was born in Novara, Italy. Lives and works in Lisbon and Peniche, Portugal.
She holds a degree from IULM (Milan, Italy, 1999) and a Master’s degree in Arts from ESAD.CR (Caldas da Rainha, Portugal, 2025).
After a few years of professional experience in marketing and category management, and a long travel through South America, she settled in Lisbon, Portugal (2008), where she later started her art practice (2018).
In 2019, she was awarded a grant from Carmona e Costa Foundation – MArt -Sá da Costa to participate in MArt residency programme, 2019-2020.
Between 2020 and 2022, she integrated the team of RAMA – Residencias Artísticas.
In 2023, she was selected for the book Portuguese Emerging Art, edited by Emerge.
In 2024, she was selected for the prize Prémio Arte Jovem – Millennium BCP, organized by Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa.
Through the exploration of the relations among materials, images and symbols, her practice focuses on the ever-unfulfilled yearning for transcending the limits of the individual, the dialectics between part andwhole, as responses to the fragility of existence.