[1] In her teenage years she studied painting with Emília dos Santos Braga in Lisbon and Fernand Léger, sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle, and engraving with Stanley William Hayter.

The following year, she left for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she gained prominence as an artist for her dense and complex compositions.

Vieira da Silva received the French government's Grand Prix National des Arts in 1966, the first woman so honored.

[2] In the 1930s Vieira da Silva began producing her characteristic works which were heavily impastoed, and overlaid with a complex arrangement of small rectangles.

Her work is related to French Tachisme, American Abstract expressionism, and Surrealism, as were many of her contemporaries who were painting in Post-War Paris during the mid to late 1940s and early 1950s.

Her paintings often resemble mazes, cities seen in profile or from high above or even library shelves in what seems to be an allegory to a never-ending search for Knowledge or the Absolute.

[1] In November 1994, the Árpád Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation was inaugurated in Lisbon, a museum that displays a large collection of paintings by both artists.

From 2019 to 2020, a substantial survey exhibition of her paintings and works on paper toured from Jeanne Bucher Jaeger in Paris, to Waddington Custot in London, and Di Donna Galleries in New York.

[10] In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.