Transparencies: Mira Schendel

In the year that marks the gallery’s 50^th anniversary, Luisa Strina is proud to announce the opening of Mira Schendel: Transparencies, a comprehensive exhibition of the renowned artist. Mira Schendel (1919-1988) was a pioneering figure in Latin American art who worked with Strina in the 1980s, where she had exhibitions in 1981 and 1983.  

Organized by Olivier Renauld-Clement on behalf of the Schendel family and Hauser & Wirth, Mira Schendel: Transparencies will showcase a wide selection of Schendel's Monotypes produced between 1963 and 1965 alongside a series of sculptural objects in acrylic produced in the late 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition is also accompanied by an original essay by Rodrigo Moura, Chief Curator of the Museo del Barrio in New York.

The Monotipias offer a glimpse into Schendel's experimental and groundbreaking approach to artmaking. Each piece reveals her meticulous exploration of texture, form, and translucency, showcasing a nuanced interplay of light and shadow. The monotypes were extremely experimental at the time of their making. They were made by applying talcum powder to one side of a piece of Japanese tissue paper and laying this paper onto a pre-oiled glass sheet. Schendel then ‘drew’ with various instruments including her fingers by applying pressure to the unoiled side. The process created an emotive line that almost felt like part of the paper and allowed Schendel to respond gesturally and calligraphically to the material. These graphic marks, letters and blotches resulted in extraordinarily beautiful and poetic two-sided drawings which are shown at the gallery on bespoke backlit shelves that preserve their transparency.

In Schendel’s next bodies of work transparency presents itself as the catalyst to the spectator’s experience of the body and sight. She started using acrylic, which, suspended into the air, allows the image and the plane to unfold into two: to see through and “a circular reading in which the text is the motionless center, and the reader is mobile”, as the artist stated. These formulations gave rise to Objetos gráficos (Graphic objects, 1967-1973), in which sheets of paper are superimposed to create squares where the interplay of full and empty amplifies the graphic sign in between silence and noise through repetition and alterations in scale. Suspended from a nylon thread, works from the series Transformáveis (Transformables) are composed of small strips of transparent material hinged together to evoke the sensation of mutability and play. The work rotates in air, casting constantly changing shadows and reflections.

Also included in the exhibition are works from the Discos series from the early 1970s, where Schendel started to make sculptural objects using acrylic and Letraset. Synthesizing the formal experimentation with the Monotypes, this body of work continued to embrace spiritual ideas of "the other side" of transparency, a place where other worlds and other forms of materiality existed. The round ‘discs’ are made from acrylic sheets sandwiched together. They encase flurries of Letrasetletters and symbols, which are legible but untranslatable compositions. Here too, language is seen as a sort of cosmic dust, inchoate and infinite.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

Mira Schendel is one of the most significant artists to emerge from Latin America during the twentieth century. Born in Switzerland in 1919, Schendel emigrated to Brazil from Europe in 1949, ultimately settling in São Paulo in 1953, where she swiftly occupied a leading place in the country's vibrant post-war artistic scene.

Traversing the realms of painting, drawing and sculpture, while deriving inspiration from a constellation of sources—as varied as Concrete Poetry, semiotics, phenomenology, the epic tradition, Zen Buddhism, and aspects of Eastern and Western philosophy—Schendel's prolific body of works provoked a radically new lexicon of avant-gardist practice in Brazil.

The late Brazilian poet, Haroldo de Campos, has described the spirit of her work as "an art of voids", wherein, "the utmost redundancy begins to produce original information; an art of words and quasi-words where the graphic form veils and unveils, seals and unseals… a semiotic art of icons, indexes, symbols which print on the blank of the page their luminous foam."

Born in Zurich to a family of Jewish origin, Schendel was baptized and raised as a Catholic in Italy. In 1938, while studying philosophy at the Catholic University in Milan, Schendel was persecuted for her family's Jewish heritage. Forced to relinquish her studies and citizenship, Schendel sought asylum in Yugoslavia before passing through Switzerland and Austria (with the initial intent of establishing herself in Sophia, Bulgaria), and ultimately settling in Brazil.

This history is vital to the spiritual sensibility underlying the poetics of Schendel's work, as well as to her particular investigations of language and its material embodiments.

Although Schendel received considerable recognition during her lifetime, since her death in 1988, her work has continued to achieve national and international visibility: cementing her status as one of the most important artistic voices of her time.