From April 12 to September 15, 2025, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of a Space, a major exhibition dedicated to one of the most original voices in 20th-century art, curated by Flavia Frigeri, art historian and curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Through a selection of about seventy key works, coming from prestigious international museum collections, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Guggenheim Museum, New York, Tate Modern, London, as well as important galleries such as Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris, and private collections, the exhibition offers an in-depth and entirely new look at the evolution of the visual language of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (Lisbon, 1908 - Paris, 1992). 

Highlighting the strong relationship between abstraction and figuration, the exhibition traces the most significant moments of Vieira da Silva's career, from the 1930s to the late 1980s, and emphasizes her interest in architectural spaces, where the boundary between real and imaginary urban landscapes dissolves, going far beyond formal references to Portuguese visual culture and avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Futurism. What emerges anew from the exhibition is a reconsideration of her work as independent from the Informal movement, with which it has often been associated in the past, and instead recognizing the fundamental importance of both her experience in Paris, where she moved at a young age for study reasons, and the period of exile in Rio de Janeiro, where she sought refuge with her husband Árpád Szenès, also an artist, during World War II, and where she created a dense network of contacts.