Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

In the spring of 2025, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents “Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space”. Featuring approximately 70 works, the exhibition offers an exploration of the visual language of the Portuguese-born artist, who was later naturalised as a French citizen.

Through Vieira da Silva’s references to Portuguese decorative traditions, as well as Cubism and Futurism, the exhibition examines the connections in her painting between abstraction and figuration within real or imaginary spaces.

After Venice, the exhibition will travel to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in the fall of 2025.

Curator
Flavia Frigeri, Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London

Opening Hours
Every day except Tuesday, from 10 AM to 6 PM

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Alice Pauli. Gallerist, Collector, Art Patron

Musée cantonal des beaux-arts de Lausanne (MCBA)

In tribute to the generosity of Alice Pauli, the exhibition celebrates the extraordinary journey of a pioneer. The exhibition features figures of the international contemporary art scene and key personalities of the Swiss art world, bringing together artists whose work this exceptional woman was delighted to see united.

The creations of major figures in contemporary art—among them Louise Nevelson, Giuseppe Penone, Pierre Soulages, and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva—resonate with encounters made during the Salon international de galeries-pilotes. Pauli’s connections to the Swiss artistic scene are reflected in the presentation of works by Louis Soutter, Jean Lecoultre, and Juan Martínez. A room dedicated to the Polish and Yugoslavian art scenes of the 1960s, as well as another devoted to the work of Alicia Penalba, highlight the visionary spirit of a woman driven by a desire to share her artistic emotions and passion for art with the public.

Curation
Camille Lévêque-Claudet, Curator of Ancient and Modern Art, MCBA

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InformELLEs

Hessen Kassel Museum, Germany

From 11 October 2024 to 26 January 2025, Hessen Kassel Heritage will be paying homage to women artists and Informalism from the 1950s/60s with “InformELLEs”, a special exhibition at the New Gallery.

Between the early 1950s and the early 1960s, art informel, or informalism, became the dominant art movement in Europe. Completely beyond the classic principles of form and design, the works focused on the open creation process. At first glance, this abstract movement appears to be dominated primarily by art produced by male artists. However, this exhibition now examines art informel from a new perspective, and pays homage to sixteen of its leading female proponents, including Maria Lassnig, Brigitte Meier-Denninghoff, Judit Reigl, Mary Bauermeister, Marie-Louise von Rogister and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. It will not only feature works by these well-known names, but also by rediscovered other long forgotten female artists. On the basis of questions about networks, exhibition participations and reception from a sociology of art perspective, it will also explore the mechanisms of the art business.

The exhibition is a collaborative project organised by Hessen Kassel Heritage, Kunsthalle Schweinfurt and the Emil Schumacher Museum in Hagen in cooperation with the Research Centre of Art Informel at the Art History Institute of the University of Bonn.

Action, Gesture, Paint | Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–70

Whitechapel Gallery, London

Whitechapel Gallery presents a major exhibition of 150 paintings from an overlooked generation of 81 international women artists.

Reaching beyond the predominantly white, male painters whose names are synonymous with the Abstract Expressionist movement, this exhibition celebrates the practices of the numerous international women artists working with gestural abstraction in the aftermath of the Second World War.

It is often said that the Abstract Expressionist movement began in the USA, but this exhibition’s geographic breadth demonstrates that artists from all over the world were exploring similar themes of materiality, freedom of expression, perception and gesture, endowing gestural abstraction with their own specific cultural contexts – from the rise of fascism in parts of South America and East Asia to the influence of Communism in Eastern Europe and China.

The exhibition features well-known artists associated with the Abstract Expressionism movement, including American artists Lee Krasner(1908-1984) and Helen Frankenthaler(1928-2011), alongside lesser-known figures such as Mozambican-Italian artist Bertina Lopes(1924-2012) and South Korean artist Wook-kyung Choi(1940-1985). More than half of the works have never before been on public display in the UK.

Artists:
Mary Abbott, Etel Adnan, Maliheh Afnan, Ruth Armer, Gillian Ayres, Ida Barbarigo, Noemí Di Benedetto, Anna-Eva Bergman, Janice Biala, Bernice Bing, Sandra Blow, Dusti Bongé, Chinyee, Wook-kyung Choi, Jay DeFeo, Martha Edelheit, Amaranth Ehrenhalt, Asma Fayoumi, Lilly Fenichel, Perle Fine, Else Fischer-Hansen, Audrey Flack, Elna Fonnesbech-Sandberg, Juana Francés, Helen Frankenthaler, Sonia Gechtoff, Judith Godwin, Gloria Gómez-Sánchez, Elsa Gramcko, Sarah Grilo, Grace Hartigan, Lilian Holt, Buffie Johnson, Yuki Katsura, Helen Khal, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Bice Lazzari, Lifang, Bertina Lopes, Margaret Mellis, Marta Minujín, Joan Mitchell, Aiko Miyawaki, Yolanda Mohalyi, Nasreen Mohamedi, Emiko Nakano, Lea Nikel, Tomie Ohtake, Fayga Ostrower, Mercedes Pardo, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, Pat Passlof, Alice Rahon, Carol Rama, Marie Raymond, Judit Reigl, Deborah Remington, Britta Ringvall, Erna Rosenstein, Behjat Sadr, Nadia Saikali, Zilia Sánchez, Fanny Sanín, Miriam Schapiro, Sarah Schumann, Ethel Schwabacher, Sonja Sekula, Toko Shinoda, Sylvia Snowden, Janet Sobel, Vivian Springford, Franciszka Themerson, Alma Thomas, Yvonne Thomas, Hedwig Thun, Nína Tryggvadóttir, Elsa Vaudrey, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Michael West

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Paris et nulle part ailleurs

Musée de l'histoire de l'immigration

24 artistes étrangers à Paris. 1945-1972

The exhibition Paris et nulle part ailleurs (Paris and Nowhere Else) immerses the public in the years of post-war tumult that saw the emergence of new artistic visions, in the fields of abstraction, figuration and kinetic art, between 1945 and 1972.
In the first half of the 20th century, Paris was the world capital of the arts, a hotbed for avant-garde movements, attracting artists and intellectuals from across the world. After World War 2, despite the increasing appeal of New York, Paris and – for many people – nowhere else, was still the place you had to go to be trained, to create, to exhibit, to compare your work with that of others, to write the very history of art.

The exibition
Of the 15,000 artists active in Paris at this time, 60 to 65% of them were foreigners. Whether they spent a few months, a few years, left and came back, or settled there definitively, why did these artists come? How was their work impacted by this change in environment, how does it express that? Are their migratory paths similar to those of their compatriots? Paris et nulle part ailleurs examines 24 artists of various origins (Europe, Africa, Latin America, USA, Asia) who came to Paris and whose work helps us grasp the key issues of migration.

Organised into four themes: going into exile, blending home culture and host culture, reacting to the strangeness of the world they were discovering, building a universal language without borders, the exhibition covers the motivations for leaving, the experience of settling in, socializing, and a sometimes difficult everyday life in a more or less welcoming and cosmopolitan city, now their new home..

The exhibition features around one hundred works from private and public collections – drawings, sculptures, paintings, collages – by Shafic Abboud (Lebanon), Eduardo Arroyo (Spain), André Cadere (Romania), Ahmed Cherkaoui (Morocco), Carlos Cruz-Diez (Vénezuela), Dado (Montenegro), Erró (Iceland), Tetsumi Kudo (Japan), Wifredo Lam (Cuba), Julio Le Parc (Argentina), Milvia Maglione (Italy), Roberto Matta (Chile), Joan Mitchell (USA), Véra Molnar (Hungary), Iba N’Diaye (Senegal), Alicia Penalba (Argentina), Judit Reigl (Hungary), Antonio Seguí (Argentina), Jesús Rafael Soto (Venezuela), Daniel Spoerri (Romania), Hervé Télémaque (Haiti), Victor Vasarely (Hungary), Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (Portugal), Zao Wou-Ki (China).

Exhibition curated
Jean-Paul Ameline

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Modernités portugaises

Musée Caillebotte

Embrassant une vaste période, des années 1910 aux années 1960, l’histoire du modernisme portugais, dont le poète Fernando Pessoa fut la figure tutélaire et son principal fondateur, se déroule entre le Portugal et Paris : la capitale française, centre artistique international depuis le XIX^e siècle, attire les Portugais en quête de modernité.

Cette histoire méconnue s’insère dans un contexte international bien plus vaste et met en lumière, à partir d’artistes de générations et de styles différents, un modernisme de tous les pays, de tous les continents.

Avec plus d’une centaine d’œuvres d’artistes portugais célèbres ou peu connus en France, mais qui tous ont contribué à l’art moderne lusitanien comme international, cette exposition nous amène à déplacer notre regard, à le faire voyager, et à penser l’histoire de l’art en dehors de ses grandes figures.

Sont exposées, les œuvres de Sarah Affonso, José de Almada Negreiros, Mário Cesariny, António Dacosta, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Ofélia Marques, Santa Rita Pintor, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Árpád Szenes, Eduardo Viana, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.

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Vieira da Silva, l’oeil du labyrinthe

Musée Cantini, Marseille

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WOMEN IN ABSTRACTION

Musée Guggenheim Bilbao

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Women in Abstraction

Centre Pompidou, Paris

The exhibition sets out to write the history of the contributions of women artists to abstraction, with one hundred and six artists and more than five hundred works dating from the 1860s to the 1980s.

“Women in Abstraction” provides an opportunity to discover artists who represent discoveries both for the specialist and for the general public. It showcases the work of many of these women who suffer from a lack of visibility and recognition beyond the frontiers of their countries. Reviewing their specific contribution to the history of abstraction, the exhibition focuses on the careers of artists who were sometimes unjustly eclipsed from the history of art.

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Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, l’espace en jeu

Musée d'art moderne de Céret

L’exposition « Vieira da Silva, l’espace en jeu » présente l’œuvre de Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (Lisbonne 1908-Paris 1992), femme peintre et figure majeure de l’art moderne, pour la première fois au musée d’art moderne de Céret.

L’exposition « Vieira da Silva, l’espace en jeu » offre au public l’opportunité de découvrir une artiste peu exposée dans le sud de la France depuis la présentation de la dation au musée Fabre à Montpellier en 1994. Elle retrace un parcours exceptionnel par sa cohérence et par la profondeur et la qualité de la recherche picturale. Depuis les premiers dessins anatomiques jusqu’aux ultimes papiers noyés de lumière, soit plus d’un demi-siècle de création, l’accent est mis sur son œuvre graphique rarement exposé, parfois inédit.

Commissariat : Nathalie Gallissot, conservatrice en chef, directrice du musée d’art moderne de Céret, assistée de Julie Chateignon, assistante de conservation.
Coordination : Lydia Fons et Aude Marchand, assistantes principales de conservation.

Catalogue d’exposition réalisé avec Edition d’art Somogy : textes de Marina Bairrão Ruivo, Rémi Cariel, Diane Daval Béran, Nathalie Gallissot et Véronique Jaeger.

Site internet du Musée d’art moderne de Céret