Anatomy of Space spans over five decades of creation—from the mid-1930s to the late 1980s—and brings together some seventy works from major international collections, including the Centre Pompidou, MoMA, Tate and the Guggenheim. The exhibition intertwines the artist’s biographical and artistic paths, and explores the development of a singular visual language at the intersection of abstraction and figuration.

The retrospective offers a renewed perspective on her practice, moving beyond recurring comparisons with Art Informel in favour of a more nuanced reading, rooted in her lived experience and creative process. It also revisits Vieira da Silva’s early ties with Peggy Guggenheim—who exhibited her in New York as early as 1943—and the pivotal support of Hilla Rebay, instrumental in the 1936 acquisition of Composition for the founding collection of the Guggenheim Museum.

The two works loaned by the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art reflect this reading: Paris, la nuit (1951), a labyrinthine composition, and Dédale (1975), a later work built around compressed geometry. Two milestones in a practice defined by the continuous recomposition of pictorial space.