Bilbao,
Over five decades, between the 1930s and the 1980s, he fundamentally delved into the options for representing space: through labyrinths, through rhythms generated through color or through fragmented perspectives. Also starting from imaginary or real scenarios and exploring their links with time and memory.
Under the curatorship of Flavia Frigeri and after its stay, until last September, at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Bilbao Guggenheim hosts “Anatomy of Space”, an anthology that analyzes, in eight sections, the evolution of the language of Helena Vieira da Silva, born in Lisbon and established in Paris. He pays attention above all to the dissolution in his work of the barriers between real-based urban landscapes and those completely conceived and in his approaches to architecture from personal approaches, apart from those based on cubism or futurism and on the tradition of the visual culture of his country.
His work is indebted to his early training in anatomy and sculpture and also to his meticulous observation of the painting of Cézanne and the later avant-garde of the 20th century, but in his desire to merge the aforementioned space with memory and time he knew how to deploy particular codes that led him to eliminate the distances between figures and backgrounds.
It is no coincidence that the Guggenheim centers are the ones that discover their production to a wide public: Vieira da Silva was one of the artists that Peggy Guggenheim included in the exhibition “31 Mujeres”, in her New York room Art of This Century in 1943 (as Fundación MAPFRE reminded us a few months ago); and Hilla Rebay, who was the first director of the Museum of Non Objective Painting, predecessor of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, supported it early by acquiring, in 1937, Composition (1936), still in the collections of the American museum.
“Anatomy of Space” starts at the beginning: at the age of twenty, the author moved to Paris to begin her art studies at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. There she met the man who would become her husband, the Hungarian Arpad Szenes; and both were photographed on several occasions. As we will have the opportunity to see at the Guggenheim, he used to paint it with his work instruments.
Gradually, his personal workshop became, for Vieira da Silva, not only a place of creation, but also a place where he could reflect on architectural spaces and their structures, to which he gave an almost anatomical character. The piece that Rebay acquired is very representative of that moment, as are other compositions from the same year in which we find skeletal forms.
Along with spaces, other recurring themes were dance and chess, the latter as a metaphor for life, as a game of action and reaction. The artist began to consolidate in these creations, from the thirties and forties, an abstract language in which the figurative is at times hidden and revealed and meticulous squares are juxtaposed, distantly evoking Portuguese tiles.
The Second World War would be a bitter turning point for Vieira, both in his life and in his painting. He had to go into exile in Brazil, and with the exception of some carnival scenes that evoke obvious joy, most of his works from this time suggest the tragedy and blackness of those years.
She would return to Paris in 1947, and although it seems that she was impressed by the state in which the city had been left, she celebrated her liberation in pieces such as National fete either Fêtes à Parisfrom 1949 and 1950. He then resumed his study of spaces and architectures, sometimes adopting the checkered patterns that he had already used with his dancers and harlequins, to later expand the arch and attend to the city as a visual object.
It is then that Vieira da Silva confirms that the representation of a place implies the capture of its atmospheres, although that of its urban settings is rather generic, common, as can be seen in Paris, the night (1951), Venetian Fête (1949), The tentacular city (1954) or Characters in the street (1948).
Interiors and exteriors then followed one another on his canvases: construction sites, railway stations and churches, sometimes in the process of construction and other times projecting into infinity. As towards infinity, the white of the compositions with which the exhibition culminates, corresponding to various periods, tend: they allude to different stages on his path to abstraction, in which he perhaps did not finish immersing himself.
“Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Anatomy of space”
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO
Abandoibarra Avenue, 2
Bilbao
From October 16, 2025 to February 22, 2026
