Maria Helena Vieira da Silva at Waddington Custot 

Explore the London iteration of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, which was on view at Waddington Custot from 30 November 2019 - 15 February 2020.
“I look at the street and at people walking on foot with different appearances advancing at different speeds. I think of the invisible threads which manipulate them… I try and see the machinery which organises them. I think this is in a way what I attempt to paint.”
Over the course of a year, Waddington Custot in London, Jeanne Bucher Jaeger in Paris, and Di Donna Galleries in New York presented a landmark travelling exhibition of important works by the Portuguese-born painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, a first-of-its-kind collaboration between the three international galleries.
Bringing together key paintings and works on paper from throughout the artist’s career, the exhibition explored Vieira da Silva’s unique approach to depicting space through poetic, semi-abstract compositions.
Vieira da Silva became an integral member of the expressive abstract movement in Paris following the Second World War. Studying and assimilating the early Modern styles of Cubism, Geometric Abstraction and Futurism, she embraced ambiguity between lyrical and geometric form in amalgamations of illusionistic space and defined her own personal visual vocabulary.