Rue en hiver

Provenance:
Galerie Pierre, Paris

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Saidenberg Gallery, New York

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Private Collection, Toronto
Notes:
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva is one of Portugal’s most important modern painters, emerging from a vibrant painterly scene of 1930s Paris to become a leading figure of postwar European "art informel" abstraction. She began painting at a young age, studying in Lisbon under Fernand Léger and others before moving to Paris. There, she fused the restricted palette and fragmented forms of Cubism with the machine aesthetics of Futurism and Constructivism, producing a body of work that used rhythm and pattern to create densely textured compositions that toy with spatial ambiguities.

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Vieria da Silva’s 1950s paintings focus on the landscapes and built environments that had become destabilized from the destruction of the war. While not a pure abstract artist – the grids and verticals of her canvases frequently call to mind the shimmer of a river surface, or the architecture of ruined cities – she utilized abstraction to explore the issues of fragmentation, spatial perception, and underlying order. Rue en hiver is a superb example of her work from this period. The location is unspecific and uncertain, yet we can perceive rhythms and structure of a city street: the strong black lines and slashes of white give the impression of buildings and snowbanks, while the glints of yellow imply the reflected glow of a setting sun.