Save-the-date artwork for the Arpad Szenes third exhibition cycle 2026

Fundação Arpad Szenes – Vieira da SilvaAmoreiras / Rato

Arpad Szenes: Collection Highlights (Third Exhibition Cycle 2026)

Now showing20 September 2026 – 24 January 2027€7.50

The museum's third exhibition cycle of 2026 turns the spotlight on Arpad Szenes, with a new selection of his work drawn from the foundation's collection.

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On now All of November 2026

You start on the ground floor, among abstract engravings from the 1930s. Szenes went back to one of them in 1983: Le Couple (Marie-Hélène), two bodies wound together in a space broken into planes. The woman is Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, his wife for 55 years and, says the curator, the subject he painted most.

Upstairs, six sections run from charcoal self-portraits made just after the First World War, through surrealist couples melting into a chair, to a last room of pale sea and sky. The bigger canvases are left out on purpose. Director Nuno Faria wants you to look at him "as if seeing a new artist". His name comes first on the museum's sign, yet this is his first big solo show in Portugal in 20 years.

Tickets are €7.50, and entry is free on Sundays, for under-25s and for Lisbon residents. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 18:00.

Editor's pick

In Le Couple, Arpad Szenes and Vieira da Silva melt into a chair, one eye of hers peeking out. His name comes first on the museum's sign, yet this is his first big solo show in Portugal in 20 years.

Look for

Le Couple, fused with a chair
In the Metamorphoses section, Arpad and Vieira merge with a chair into one body, an eye of hers peeking out; Faria calls it perhaps the series' masterpiece.
Vieira painting the hanged
A 1944 ink drawing from Rio shows Vieira at work on a painting of hanged figures that nobody has seen since.
The 1920s self-portraits
The first section, Obra ao Negro, is mostly charcoal and Indian-ink self-portraits, hung beside drawings of trees and burnt forests.
Vieira asleep among butterflies
Look for Vieira lying down inside a caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis; Szenes drew her asleep again and again.
The Irisdescências room
The last room holds 1960s and 70s paintings in pale colours, fields of sea and sky with no figures left in them.