La gare inondée (The Flooded Station)

La gare inondée (The Flooded Station) is an oil on canvas painting by the Portuguese-French artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva that she executed in 1956. It was to be auctioned at Christie's, London, on 13 February 2014, when it was expected to fetch between £350,000 and £450,000, but was withdrawn.

Description
The painting is typical of Vieira da Silva's 1950s work that define her oeuvre and which paralleled the development of abstract expressionism in the United States at the same time. However Vieira da Silva's work differs from that movement in her treatment of space. She sought to free herself from the constraint of linear perspective, achieving in her mature work a sense of space with a dense mesh of lines and marks set against a background of flecks of color varying in intensity of tone.