Mira Schendel

Mira Schendel (June 7, 1919 – July 24, 1988) was a Brazilian contemporary artist of the 20th century.

She made numerous drawings on rice paper, but was also active as a painter, a poet, and a sculptor.

Her work drew upon the art of language and poetry, and what appears to have driven her was the ability to reinvent it.

Mira Schendel was born Myrrha Dagmar Dub in 1919 in Zurich, Switzerland.

Her father, Karl Leo Dub, was a fabric merchant, and her mother, Ada Saveria Büttner, was a milliner.

Although she had Jewish heritage, Schendel was baptized at her mother's request at the Kirche St. Peter and Paul, a Catholic church in Zurich, on October 20, 1920 and was raised as a Roman Catholic.

Schendel's parents divorced in September 1922, and her mother married Count Tommaso Gnoli in 1937.

In the late 1930s, Schendel began to study philosophy at the Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan.

During her time in Milan Schendel also attended an art class.

During the 1930s and 1940s figurative 'modernismo' had been dominant, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s abstract-geometric art began to be shown in Brazil and led to the founding of the Concrete art movement Ruptura in 1952.

In São Paulo, an immigrant city that was industrial and undergoing rapid growth, Schendel found a circle of emigre intellectuals from different disciplines with whom she could discuss ideas about aesthetics and philosophy; this included the Czech-born philosopher Vilem Flusser, the physicist Mário Schenberg and the psychoanalyst Theon Spanudis among others.

She became a prolific modernist painter and sculptor.

She used paint with talc and brick dust, and made many drawings on rice paper.

According to Laura Cumming her art has its sources in phenomenology,

in the idea of being and nothingness, in mystical thinking and her deep

reading of Wittgenstein.

But the impact of these works does not depend

upon the viewer sharing either that knowledge or those interests.

Schendel’s work features mixtures of calligraphy, phrases, letters, and encrypted traces of language.

The graphic output in Schendel’s paintings explore the relations between language and art, and the inquiry into that relationship reveals itself in the totality of her work.

Because of racial laws introduced in Fascist Italy in 1938, she was designated as Jewish, stripped of her Italian citizenship and forced to leave university, and so decided to flee Italy in 1939.

After travelling through Switzerland and Austria, she joined a group of refugees heading to Sarajevo.

After spending the war in Sarajevo, she returned to Italy, with her first husband Josep Hargesheimer, and worked for the International Refugee Organisation in Rome.

Having applied to various countries in the Americas, in August 1949 she emigrated and settled with Josep in Brazil.

Mira Schendel's arrival in Brazil ended a tortuous journey.

Her significant background perhaps explains the theme of emancipation from the body/mind dialect and the metaphysical experience coinciding found throughout her work.

Schendel’s paintings from the mid-1950s depict shallow surfaces, simplified figuration, and muted tones, and the textures and materials stand out more than the values of the color.

These early works suggest a play of opposition between visual elements and the hand of the artist.

When she arrived in São Paulo in 1953, Brazilian modernism was dominated by a debate between figuration and abstraction.

In the early 1960s, the corporeal component of Schendel’s paintings began to change as she moved toward a more imprecise and all-embracing involvement with space.

In the early 1960s, Schendel received a gift of rice paper from Mário Schenberg and in 1964 began to use this to make monotype drawings.

Between 1964 and 1966, Schendel produced almost two thousand drawings in oil paintings on fine rice paper, as well as the Monotypes series.

The central subject Schendel explored in these notebooks was time, the dimension of language.

In Monotypes, Schendel dealt with the desire to dismantle the teleology of language.

Schendel’s technique for these works was to apply paint to a glass laminate, apply a light layer of talcum powder over it to prevent paper from picking it up on contact, then used her fingernails and other points instrumented to draw on paper she would lay on the glass.

This technique makes the drawing seem to emerge from within the paper and transforms the text she draws to antitext.

The lines of Schendel’s drawings are driven toward writing.

The precise inscriptions are linked to letters and words and the gesture of her hand is linked to more general meanings.

Her works explore the universality of language.

However, later in her career lines lost association with the movement of her hand and gained the generality of concepts as she began to place them in ambiguous situations.