A serious survey of the Portuguese summary painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908-92) opens on the Peggy Guggenheim Assortment in Venice this April, earlier than travelling to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao within the autumn. Although a nationwide treasure in Portugal, and well-known in France—the place a 2022 retrospective toured Marseille and Dijon—the artist’s wider popularity has dwindled since her loss of life, and she or he nonetheless “must be rediscovered by many audiences”, in keeping with the present’s curator, Flavia Frigeri. “There’s a lot about what she’s doing and the themes that she’s exploring which are nonetheless related to us now.”
The exhibition Anatomy of House, which contains round 70 works from private and non-private lenders all over the world, takes a broadly chronological view of Vieira da Silva’s evolving visible language. Medieval frescoes, Cubism and Futurism are amongst her influences, her explorations of motion in house in Le Jeu de cartes (1937) and Determine de ballet (1948) giving option to actual and imagined cityscapes. The exhibition will spotlight the affect of her pupil years in Paris and her traumatic exile together with her husband, the Hungarian artist Árpád Szenes, in Rio de Janeiro in the course of the Second World Conflict.
Vieira da Silva’s Le Jeu de cartes (1937, the cardboard recreation) Non-public assortment, France-Portugal
“That comfortable spot the place abstraction meets figuration is one thing she does very cleverly,” Frigeri says, including that this pressure originates in a push and pull between house and the physique, acknowledged within the present’s title. “She had studied anatomy and been very invested within the illustration of the determine. Although she knew she didn’t wish to be a figurative artist, it by some means lingered together with her”.
It’s a mark of Vieira da Silva’s uncommon biography that the exhibition will open with a bit on her lifelong relationship with Szenes, whose much less profitable profession as a painter complemented however by no means overshadowed her personal. Her story “is the entire reversal of the same old tales that we hear [about women artists]”, Frigeri says.
One function of Vieira da Silva’s success was early recognition by each Peggy Guggenheim, who included her in Exhibition by 31 Ladies in1943, and Hilla Rebay, who in 1937 purchased Composition (1936) on behalf of Solomon R. Guggenheim. The artist described herself as “a creature of the studio”, for whom it was greater than a sensible useful resource, offering a framework for the reflections on architectural house on the coronary heart of her work.
Vieira da Silva’s Determine de ballet (1948, ballet determine) Courtesy Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger; Paris-Lisbon © Maria Elena Vieira da Silva; by SIAE 2025
It’s serendipitous that the present coincides with the Venice Structure Biennale, Frigeri says. “She had a heightened consciousness of what it means to expertise the town, each as an area that accommodates you, but additionally because the psychological projection of the numerous routes you possibly can take, the alternative ways you possibly can expertise it”.
• Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of House, Peggy Guggenheim Assortment, Venice, 12 April-15 September; Guggenheim Bilbao, 17 October-22 February 2026
