Venice, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection dedicates an exhibition to Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice presents from April 12 to September 15, 2025 the exhibition Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Anatomy of a Space, curated by Flavia Frigeri. The exhibition offers an in-depth and wholly new look at theevolution of the visual language of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (Lisbon, 1908 - Paris, 1992), a Portuguese artist naturalized French, through a selection of about seventy significant works from major international museums and galleries, including the Centre Pompidou, MoMA, Tate Modern and the Arpad Szenes - Vieira da Silva Foundation.

The exhibition aims to highlight Vieira da Silva’s ability to transform pictorial space into abstract environments and optical illusions, combining influences from Cubism, Futurism, the Portuguese decorative tradition and urban landscapes. The exhibition traces her career from the 1930s to the 1980s, with a focus on the international art scene in Paris, the city to which she moved at a very young age, and her period of exile in Rio de Janeiro during World War II, alongside her husband Árpád Szenès, also an artist.

Vieira da Silva is historically linked to Peggy Guggenheim, having been one of the thirty-one artists included in the historic 1943 Exhibition by 31 Women exhibition at the Art of This Century gallery in New York. In addition, one of her early supporters was Hilla Rebay, first director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (future Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), who purchased the painting Composition (1936), now part of the American museum’s collection.

After Venice, the exhibition will stop at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in fall 2025.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalog, published by Marsilio Arte, with texts by curator Flavia Frigeri, artist Giulia Andreani, writer and essayist Lauren Elkin, and art historian Jennifer Sliwka.

Pictured: Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Figure de ballet [Ballet Figure] (1948; oil and graphite on canvas, 27 x 46 cm; Paris-Lisbon, Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger. Photo by Jean-Louis Losi. © Adagp/Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris, by SIAE 2024

Venice, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection dedicates an exhibition to Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

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