Mira Schendel
25 September 2013–19 January 2014
Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
Hours: Daily 10–18h;
Friday–Saturday 10–22h
T +020 7887 8888
Tate Modern is staging the first ever international, full-scale survey of the work of Mira Schendel (1919–1988) until 19 January 2014. Schendel is one of Latin America’s most important and prolific post-war artists. Alongside her contemporaries Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica, Schendel reinvented the language of European Modernism in Brazil. The show exemplifies how Tate is continuing to rethink and re-present the history of modern and contemporary art by showing artists who established their careers outside Europe and the USA.
The exhibition brings together over 300 paintings, drawings and sculptures from across her entire career, many of which have never been exhibited before. Highlights include her Droguinhas (Little Nothings) 1965–6, soft sculptures of knotted rice paper in the form of malleable nets, originally exhibited in London (Signals Gallery, 1966); and the Graphic Objects 1967–8, a group of works that explore language and poetry and were first shown at the 1968 Venice Biennale.
Other important works in the show are Schendel’s early abstract paintings, among them Tate’s Untitled, 1963; her later monotype drawings on rice paper, of which she made over 2000; and the installations Still Waves of Probability, 1969, and Variants, 1977. Schendel’s final complete series of works, abstract paintings titled “Sarrafos,” 1987, are also included. The “Sarrafos” are white monochromes with a black batten extending from their surface, addressing the body, space and environment of the spectator.
Mira Schendel was born in Zurich in 1919 and 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. Although brought up as a Catholic, Schendel was persecuted during WWII for her Jewish heritage. She was forced to leave university, due to anti-Semitic laws introduced in Italy, and flee to Yugoslavia.
Schendel’s early experience of cultural, geographic and linguistic displacement is evident in her work, as is her interest in religion and philosophy. She developed an extraordinary intellectual circle in São Paulo of philosophers, poets, psychoanalysts, physicists and critics—many of them émigrés like herself—and engaged in correspondence with intellectuals across Europe, such as Max Bense, Hermann Schmitz and Umberto Eco. Among key exhibitions featuring Schendel’s work were the first and numerous subsequent editions of the São Paulo Bienal; the 1968 Venice Biennale; a solo show at the Galeria de Arte SESI, São Paulo (1997); and Tangled Alphabets with León Ferrari at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009).
Mira Schendel was conceived in partnership with the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, where the exhibition will be shown in 2014. It is curated by Tanya Barson from Tate Modern and Taisa Palhares from the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue by Tate Publishing and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.
Sponsored by Itau.
