Maria Helena Vieira da Silva was born on 12 June 1908 in Lisbon. At the age of eleven, she entered the Academia das Belas Artes to study drawing and painting. At the age of nineteen, she moved to Paris, where she practised painting with Fernand Léger, sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle, and then Charles Despiau, as well as engraving with Stanley William Hayter.

A major figure in European abstraction, Vieira da Silva was part of the New School of Paris, a veritable melting pot of international artists active in the City of Light, which regained its power to attract and fascinate after the war. Like the other artists of this movement, she uses an expressive form of abstraction based on the real world, occupying a kind of middle ground between figuration and abstraction. From the 1950s onwards, her works show a strong interest in urban landscapes, harbours, crossroads and other transitory areas, mixing allusive figuration with the abstraction of complex compositions and fragmented forms.

The exhibition Paris et nulle part ailleurs allows the public to immerse itself in the post-war effervescence that saw the emergence in Paris of new artistic visions in fields as varied as abstraction, figuration, kinetic art and body art.