The exhibition opened on 13 June 1988 at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's (FCG) Temporary Exhibitions Gallery (Lower Ground Floor) to celebrate the 80th birthday of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (Lisbon, Portugal 1908 - Paris, France 1992) in an homage to the Portuguese painter by the Foundation. That same day, Vieira da Silva was awarded the Order of Freedom by President of the Republic Mário Soares, who told the A Capital newspaper, with regard to the painter's exhibition: "We are very pleased to be here now to see and appreciate this beautiful retrospective exhibition of Vieira da Silva (Soares, A Capital, 14 Jun. 1988).
Jointly organised by the FCG's Modern Art Centre (CAM) and the French Ministry of Culture and Communication's Centre des Arts Plastiques, the exhibition comprised 95 pieces dating from 1931 to 1988 originating from several public and private collections in Europe and the United States. For the catalogue and the exhibition itself, the pieces were organised into four large themed groups of Vieira da Silva's scenography; memories of tiles or a prismatic view of the world; shapes and colours as music scores; density and transparency of colours.
As a complement to the exhibition, the film Ma Femme chamada Bicho by José Álvaro Morais (1943-2004) was shown twice a day. This is a biographic documentary made in 1978 about the couple Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szenes.
As well as paying homage to the painter, the exhibition aimed, according to an article in the O Dia newspaper, "to encourage a discovery of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva's multifaceted work and the complexity that the production of her work involves" ("Exposição da pintora Maria Helena Vieira da Silva", O Dia, 10 Jun. 1988).
The exhibition was widely advertised in the Portuguese press and several reports on and interviews with Vieira da Silva were published. Among the articles discussing the exhibition, one piece José Luís Porfírio wrote for the Expresso newspaper interprets the museum space and the four approaches to all of Vieira da Silva's work explored by the exhibition. Porfírio criticised the excessive number of pieces, stating that it underestimates the scale and monumental size of the canvases: "but also the effect of accumulating a large number of works means that none of them has its own space and does not fully experience a sensitive relationship with the viewer, since each one is bothered by the piece alongside it, regardless of its quality" (Porfírio, Expresso, 25 Jun. 1988).
This criticism was shared by João Pinharanda in the Jornal de Letras: "Guided by technical staff from the Grand Palais, the set-up of the exhibition is too heavy to provide a chance to select paths through the exhibition, making it harder to create favoured routes and relationships and fundamentally highlighting the trend that runs throughout the artist's work: successive returns to issues of plasticity, reproduction, from canvas to canvas, from series to series, of recurring lines in her visual world" (Pinharanda, Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias, 21 Jun. 1988).
The exhibition saw a large number of visitors roughly 60,000 by to 9 August 1988 leading it to be extended, closing on 28 August rather than on the 21st. The exhibition was seen by 72,200 visitors by 21 August.
The exhibition was put on at the Grand Palais in Paris from 22 September to 21 November. Only three painters had been given individual exhibitions here before Vieira da Silva Maurice Èsteve (1904-2001), Edouard Pignon (1905-1993) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) which demonstrates the huge importance of this homage to Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.