The exhibition illustrates the key stages of the artist’s career, marked by her tireless questioning of perspective, urban transformation, architectural dynamics, and the musicality of the pictorial touch. “Perspective is a way of playing with space. I get great enjoyment from watching space and rhythm. The architecture of a city is related to music. There are long time spans, and short ones. There are small windows. And there are large.”

The chronological and thematic exhibition retraces the artist’s career, from her figurative beginnings in Lisbon in the 1920s to the evanescent paintings of the 1980s. It follows Vieira da Silva’s creative thread in order to highlight the extent to which her work comprises a reinvention of space. The exhibit is divided into six sections, each corresponding to the decisive stages in this revolution of her gaze: Beginning / Framework / Exile / Perspective / Concept / Light. A section is also dedicated to her trip to Marseilles in 1931, which proved to be a major source of inspiration, and a key moment in the definition of her pictorial blueprint.

For the thirtieth anniversary of the death of this great artist, the exhibition at the Musée Cantini illustrates Vieira da Silva’s important contribution to the reinvention of modern art, and the contemporaneity of the concepts she explored. It is the first retrospective devoted to a 20th-century female artist organized at the Musée Cantini. This ambitious event, of international scope, aims to shed new light on the role of women in creation from this era.