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Maria Helena Vieira da Silva liked to work on several paintings at the same
time, but always with great care, concentration, and without impulsiveness. It could
take her years to complete a single piece. Among her major influences, azulejos, small
multicolored ceramic squares used in Portugal for the interior and exterior decoration
of homes, would mark her artistic style.
Passionate about dance but also games, she saw chessboards as a metaphor for life in a
mode of constant action and reaction.
War, with all its pain and violence, is also reflected in several of her paintings, such as
«The Disaster» and «The Drowned.»
The works created during their exile in Rio represent an extraordinary moment in her
career. She depicts a humanity strangled by tragedy. Once they returned to Paris in
1947, Vieira da Silva focused on the structures of urban planning.
With the war over, Paris, like many other cities on the Old Continent, began to
awaken and resume its activities. It celebrated the regained freedom and, at the same
time, studied spaces and architecture. Libraries, labyrinths, nets, grids, and spirals are
among the motifs that inspire her research into complex and dizzying spaces.
Her interest in urban planning also includes the construction of buildings.
The exhibition thus shows, in one room, two construction sites with scaffolding: a
building at the Gare Saint Lazare and that of a chapel. The final room is a tribute to
white and its nuances in her works.
The complexity of her art is expressed in the transparency of the overlapping colors.
This Italian exhibition will be on view at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao from
mid-October and is a true ode to the unique talent of a world-renowned artist.
A thousand facets in an intense palette of colors and lights: such was
the creative spirit of this woman whose works speak beyond silence.
Maria Helena Vieira da SilvaComposition (Composition), 1936 Oil on canvas 146 x 106 cm
Fundação Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva, Lisbon
© Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, by SIAE 2025







































































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