Vera Székely trained as a graphic designer at L’Atelier, a private school in Budapest in 1940, and then at Paul Colin’s (1892–1985) graphic arts school in Paris in 1944. After the Soviet Occupation, V. Székely moved first to Vienna, in 1946 and then to Paris in 1947 with her husband Pierre Székely (1923–2001), where she stayed for the rest of her artistic life. Between 1948 and 1957, she worked with the ceramic collective Székely-Borderie (SZB), producing unique ceramic pieces until the group separated. V. Székely continued her ceramic work independently, and produced mosaics for the Palm Beach swimming pool in Cannes (1958–1960). She also designed stained glass windows for churches in Auxerre (1964) and Grenoble (1965).
In the 1960s, V. Székely’s work became more sculptural and conceptual. She became interested in the power of clay to achieve spiritual quality, much like her contemporary Ettore Sottsass (1917–2007). During this period, she moved away from ceramics to explore other materials like wood, wool, salvaged metal and fibre, experimenting with materials while creating work that was less decorative, more abstract and expressive. Her first solo exhibition, Peintures, tapisseries, collages [Paintings, tapestries, collages], was held at Case d’Art gallery in Paris in 1965.

Her tapestry work was freely improvised on the loom, benefiting from the creative expression of directly working on a loom, rather than working from a predetermined pattern following the classical Aubusson method in which painters made sketches for the weavers. From 1978 onwards, her textiles joined the international tendency of post-war abstraction, exploring soft materials and sculptural installations, echoing the works of Eva Hesse (1936–1970), Leonore Tawney (1907–2007) and Cecilia Vicuña (1948–).

In the 1970s and 1990s V. Székely made a significant contribution to textile art through her innovative spatial experimentations with paper and fabric, with her breakthrough installations Structures-tensions. These consisted of large pierced, pricked, cut and tied coloured canvasses, stretched, bent and curved in order to create an architectural, modifiable space. This was the beginning of V. Székely’s experimental practice with sails, made from canvas scraps, filling them with wooden slats to produce aerial shapes and a sense of movement. Installed inside the museum, as in the 10th International Biennial of Tapestry, Lausanne (1981), her stretched canvas structures and braced sails flew above the viewer, producing a dynamic impression of movement. Throughout the 1970s, these installations in various iterations travelled from the Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris, to Copenhagen, Helsinki, Edinburgh, Amsterdam and Stockholm, under the exhibition title From the Weight of the Void to the “Plenitude of Weightlessness.”

V. Székely’s work is part of several renowned Parisian collections such as the Fonds d’art contemporain, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and the Musée des Arts décoratifs (MAD).