Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space

From April 12 through September 15, 2025, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space, a comprehensive solo exhibition dedicated to one of the most unique and original artists of the twentieth century, organized by Flavia Frigeri, art historian and curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London. After Venice, the exhibition will be on view at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao from October 15, 2025, through February 22, 2026.

Through a selection of about seventy works—on loan from leading international museums, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Guggenheim New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Tate Modern, London, as well as renowned galleries such as Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris, and cultural institutions such as the Comité Arpad Szenes-Viera da Silva, Paris, and Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation, Lisbon—the exhibition provides an in-depth exploration of the evolution of the visual language of Portuguese-born French artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992). 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. The artist is linked to both Peggy Guggenheim—she was one of the thirty-one artists included in the Exhibition by 31 Women, held at her New York museum-gallery, Art of This Century, in 1943—and to Solomon R. Guggenheim through Hilla Rebay, the first director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the forerunner of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, who was one of her earliest supporters through the purchase in 1937 of Composition (1936), which is still in the holdings of the U.S. museum. 

Born in Lisbon, Vieira da Silva trained in that city and in Paris. The idea of space became a central theme in her work, merging tradition and modernity. Her compositions, featuring labyrinthine structures, chromatic rhythms, and fragmented perspectives, capture the essence of a world in perpetual transformation. Works such as The Tiled Room (La Chambre à carreaux, 1935) or Ballet Figure (Figure de ballet, 1948) reflect her interest in architecture and movement, dissolving the distinction between figure and background and revealing a highly personal understanding of space. Vieira da Silva always experienced art as an extension of herself. As exhibition curator Flavia Frigeri points out in an essay in the catalogue, the artist was a “creature of the studio”: the atelier was not only her workspace but often also the subject of her works. Influenced by her studies of sculpture and anatomy, as well as the great masters of the past, such as Paul Cézanne and the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, Vieira da Silva developed a unique pictorial idiom, in which the physicality of space merges with the implications of time and memory.

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, published by Marsilio Arte, with essays by curator Flavia Frigeri, artist Giulia Andreani, writer and essayist Lauren Elkin, and art historian Jennifer Sliwka.

An extensive program of collateral events, created with the support of Fondazione Araldi Guinetti, Vaduz, complements the exhibition, exploring and interpreting the artist’s practice and visual language.