Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Anatomy of Space

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva was born into an affluent family in Lisbon on June 13, 1908. Her father died when she was only 2 years old, and her mother was left to raise her with the support of her family. As she grew up, Vieira da Silva was exposed to art and theater, and developed a taste for music that had a lasting impact on her. She studied painting and drawing at the Escola de Belas-Artes in Lisbon and in 1928 she moved to Paris to continue her training at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. There she met her future husband, Hungarian painter Arpad Szenes. They lived in Paris until the outbreak of World War II, when they took refuge in Rio de Janeiro, only to return to Paris seven years later. By the late 1950s, Vieira da Silva achieved great fame and recognition for her complex abstract works. She continued to paint into the late 1980s and was the recipient of numerous awards, including Commandeure de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres bestowed on her by the French government in 1960. Vieira da Silva died on March 6, 1992 in Paris.

This exhibition surveys the artist’s output from the 1930s to the late 1980s, to consider Vieira da Silva’s engagement with urban architectural landscapes and the role of memory in her work. The exhibition is grounded in a selection of key paintings showing Vieira da Silva’s repeated and continuously evolving deployment of abstract forms and optical illusions. Concurrently, it draws attention to the relationship between abstraction and figuration in her work, as seen in the architectural spaces she creates, which blur the distinction between real and imaginary cityscapes.