While training as a painter at the Academia de Belas-Artes in Lisbon, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva decided to take anatomy classes at the school of medicine, keen as she was on studying in detail the complexion of the bodies she was made to draw; and this capacity to dissect with her gaze was what led her to create intricate abstractions of architectural spaces, whether remembered or imagined. Her work caught the attention of Peggy Guggenheim, who invited her to participate in the legendary ‘Exhibition by 31 Women,’ and now it is the Bilbao franchise with her surname that is bringing back to us those outbursts of lines, checkerboards, and vanishing points which, as the Portuguese artist herself once stated, “allow us to feel and guess, from a distance, the complexity of the things in the world.”