Venice, December 13, 2024 – The abstract canvases of Maria Helena Viera da Silva and the ceramic works of Lucio Fontana are the focus of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s exhibition schedule for 2025. Indeed, over the course of the year the museum will present two major solo shows that pay tribute to these two leading figures of international twentieth-century art: an in-depth exploration of the evolution of the visual language of Portuguese-born French artist Viera da Silva, opening on April 12, 2025, followed in the fall by a fascinating immersion into the ceramic production of Fontana, one of the most renowned representatives of twentieth-century art.
Following the closing of the solo exhibition dedicated to Marina Apollonio on March 3, 2025, from April 12 through September 15, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection celebrates another leading female figure of twentieth-century art, Viera da Silva (1908–1992). The exhibition Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space, organized by art historian and National Portrait Gallery curator Flavia Frigeri, presents the artist’s pictorial production through a selection of about seventy works—on loan from prestigious international museum, as well as private collections—that highlight her ability to transform pictorial space into abstract environments and optical illusions. The artist is linked to both Peggy Guggenheim—she was one of the thirty-one artists included in the collector’s Exhibition by 31 Women, held at her New York museum-gallery, Art of This Century, in 1943—and 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. After Venice, the exhibition will travel to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in fall 2025.
From October 2025, the museum will present Manu-Facture: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana, organized by art historian and independent curator Sharon Hecker. The show is the first museum exhibition to focus exclusively on Fontana’s (1899–1968) rich corpus of ceramic works and will provide an exceptional testament to the artist’s creative imagination in sculpture. With about seventy works on loan from public and private collections, including previously unexhibited pieces, the exhibition will encompass a broad range of subjects—from human figures to animals, harlequins, warriors, as well as abstract forms. The show will also feature photographic documentation of Fontana at work and reveal the importance of the artist’s hand in the creative process. The exhibition will be on view through March 2, 2026.