Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Anatomy of Space

The work from Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (b. 1908, Lisbon; d. 1992, Paris) has been seen to incorporate a variety of styles and influences, ranging from the decorative geometry of the Hispano-Arabic Azulejo tiles to the chequered tablecloths found in Pierre Bonnard’s paintings. As a result, accounts of Vieira da Silva’s work have tended to emphasize her debt to a range of existing movements and styles, rather than highlight the development of her independent artistic vocabulary. Rarely, the literature has drawn 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. This is one of a series of aspects that this exhibition seeks to highlight.

By surveying 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 and play in her work, this exhibition will look beyond the loose formal references to Portuguese visual culture and avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Futurism. Integral to this assessment is a reconsideration of Vieira da Silva’s work as independent from the gestural aesthetics of Art Informel (to which she has frequently been aligned) and an acknowledgment of her experience of Paris, understood as a distinctly transnational hub in the postwar World War II era. Likewise, attention will be drawn to the networks Vieira da Silva established during her time in Rio de Janeiro, where she escaped to with her husband Árpád Szenès at the outbreak of World War II. The exhibition will be grounded in a selection of key paintings showing Vieira’s repeated and continuously evolving deployment of abstract forms and optical illusions. These will be complemented by drawings, engravings, illustrated books and tapestries to offer a comprehensive overview of the artist’s interdisciplinary practice.