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Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908­–1992) was an abstract painter who participated in the European Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel movements. Her work typically depicts complex interiors and city views that explore the formal elements of line, shape, and perspective. Beyond painting, Vieira da Silva also worked in printmaking, tapestries, ceramics, and stained glass.

Her father was an affluent diplomat which allowed her to travel around the world at a young age, exposing her to a variety of artistic styles. Although her father passed away when she was two years old, her mother supported her exploration of the arts. At the age of eleven, she began studying at the Academia de Belas-Artes in Lisbon where she was mentored by Emília dos Santos Braga. She moved to Paris to continue her art training in 1928 and studied under Fernand Léger, Antoine Bourdelle, Stanley William Hayter, and Othon Friesz, among others. By 1930, Vieira da Silva was exhibiting her paintings in Paris.

In 1930, Vieira da Silva married her husband, Hungarian painter Árpád Szenes. At the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, the couple returned to Portugal before moving to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They returned to Paris in 1947, and Vieira da Silva obtained French citizenship in 1956. She lived and worked in Paris until her death in 1992.

During the 1930s, Vieira da Silva created impastoed works overlaid with complex patterns of rectangles. As she developed her style, her work increasingly focused on the manipulation of space, and she created her own vocabulary of forms inspired by urban architectures, including azulejos, scaffolding, building frameworks, metal station halls, rails, and switches. Her paintings often featured fragmented forms, spatial ambiguities, and a limited colour palette typical of abstraction. Her work resembles mazes or cities, alluding to a never-ending search for knowledge. While mainly a painter, Vieira da Silva created her first stained glass windows in 1963 which were acquired by the French State. In 1955, she experimented with printmaking, and in 1971, she produced a series of lithographs.

Vieira da Silva’s work has been collected by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others. She was the first woman to be awarded the Grand Prix National des Arts in 1966, and she was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1979. In 1994, the Árpád Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation was created, a museum that shows the work of Vieira da Silva and her husband in Lisbon.