Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space

Through a selection of about seventy works, the exhibition provides an unprecedented in-depth perspective of the evolution of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s (Lisbon 1908–Paris 1992) visual language. Highlighting the important relationship between abstraction and figuration in her work, the exhibition explores key moments in Vieira da Silva’s career from the 1930s to the late 1980s. Particular attention is given to her interest in architectural space, where she dissolved the boundaries between real and imaginary urban landscapes and moved beyond formal references to Portuguese visual culture and avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Futurism. A new perspective presents the artist’s work as independent from Art Informel, with which it has often been associated. Instead, it reconsiders it in relation to her crucial experiences in Paris, where she studied as a young woman, and Rio de Janeiro, where she fled to with her husband, Arpad Szenes, also an artist, during World War II, and developed a broad network.