Mira Schendel Swiss, 1919-1988

Mira Schendel (b. 1919 Zürich, Switzerland – d. 1988 São Paulo, Brazil) lived in Milan and Rome before moving to Brazil in 1949. She settled in São Paolo in 1953, where she married Knut Schendel, and where she lived and worked until her death in 1988.

 

Schendel is considered one of the most important and influential Latin American artists of the twentieth century. While having contributed to the Concretist and Neoconcretist movements that stormed the Brazilian avant-garde, she was never associated with a single movement but her work contained elements of Lettrism, Color Field painting and early conceptual art. Schendel’s early experience of cultural, geographic and linguistic displacement is evident in her work, as is her interest in religion and philosophy.

 

Mira Schendel’s work is a visual manifestation of language, capturing voice, words, and gestures. Considered preeminent among late 20th-century Latin American artists, Schendel created delicate graphite drawings, monotypes, and watercolors of letters, words, and phrases that portray how we apprehend the world through sometimes obscure but often insistent language. Haiku-like and painterly with a keen attention to surface, Schendel’s work is less didactic and more visceral than work by her contemporaries, who investigated semiotics and post-structuralist theory in the 1980s. 

 

London's Tate Modern staged the first international full retrospective of her work in 2013.