Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space

Organized by Flavia Frigeri

In the spring of 2025, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space, curated by Flavia Frigeri, curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Through a selection of about seventy works—on loan from leading international museum institutions, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate Modern, London, as well as renowned galleries such as Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris, and private collections—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 her ability to transform pictorial space into abstract environments and optical illusions. With references to Portugal’s decorative tradition, as well as to Cubism and Futurism, the show explores the connection between abstraction and figuration in real and imaginary spaces. The artist’s career, spanning from the early 1930s to the 1980s, is examined with a particular focus on Paris’ transnational environment, which Vieira da Silva experienced as a student, and during her years of exile in Rio de Janeiro, where she fled to with her husband, Árpád Szenès, also an artist, during World War II. 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.