“Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Anatomy of Space”
This exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao surveys Vieira da Silva’s output from the 1930s to the late 1980s, to consider her engagement with urban architectural landscapes and the role of memory in her work. The exhibition is grounded in a selection of key paintings showing Vieira da Silva’s repeated and continuously evolving deployment of abstract forms and optical illusions. Concurrently, it draws 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.
Vieira da Silva’s work incorporates 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 and the abstraction of Cubism and Futurism. Her own vocabulary is based on checkerboards, networks of intertwined lines, elusive perspectives and receding spaces, which suggest in Vieira da Silva’s own words that “A painting is never finished”.
Vieira da Silva’s work is historically tied to both Peggy Guggenheim’s and Solomon R. Guggenheim’s legacies. She featured as one of the 31 artists included in Peggy Guggenheim’s Exhibition "31 Women" held at her museum-gallery Art of This Century in 1943, while Hilla Rebay was one of the first supporters of Vieira da Silva’s work, having purchased Composition (1936) now part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim’s Founding Collection in 1937.
Vieira da Silva reluctantly spoke about her work because she believed that “…painters may sound stupid when we talk. We know a lot of things, but we say them in our paintings.” However, once pressed for an explanation, she summed up her practice in a few poignant words: “As a rule, I don’t like works that flaunt their complications. I prefer those refined works that allow us to feel and guess, from a distance, the complexity of the things in the world.”
Curator: Flavia Frigeri
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