Vieira da Silva

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (Lisbon, 1908 - Paris, 1992) was one of the central figures of twentieth-century European painting, gaining international recognition through a singular language situated between figuration and abstraction. Based in Paris from the end of the 1920s, she became part of the artistic context of the so-called École de Paris, developing a body of work deeply marked by the investigation of space, of pictorial architecture and of the ambiguities of perception.

After her initial training in Lisbon, she continued her studies in Paris, where she attended sculpture and painting studios, working with artists such as Fernand Léger and Roger Bissière and at S.W. Hayter's Atelier 17. She married the painter Arpad Szenes in 1930, beginning an artistic and intellectual partnership that would mark her whole life. During the Second World War she lived in exile in Brazil, later returning to France, whose nationality she acquired in 1956.

Her work developed an immediately recognisable visual language, built through labyrinthine structures, grids, fragmented perspectives and spaces in constant transformation. Libraries, cities, game boards, maps and imagined architectures became recurring motifs in a painting that explores order and disorientation, memory and movement at the same time. Her compositions would come to be essential references for European post-war lyrical abstraction.

Over the course of her career she received some of the most important international artistic distinctions, among them the Grand Prix National des Arts of France (1966), the International Painting Prize of the São Paulo Biennial (1961) and various decorations from the French and Portuguese states. She also worked in tapestry, stained glass, illustration, stage design and public art, including the intervention for the Cidade Universitária station of the Lisbon Metro.

Her work is today part of the collections of the most important international museums, including the Centre Pompidou, MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, Tate, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva, and she remains one of the most recognised and influential Portuguese artists of all time.