Mira Schendel, Artist

Like thousands of Jewish refugees seeking a fresh start after World War II, Swiss artist Mira Schendel immigrated to Brazil. She worked prolifically in São Paulo until her final days in 1988. An important contributor to the Brazilian Constructivist movement, Schendel was inspired by both Eastern mysticism and Jungian psychoanalysis. Born in 1919 in Zurich, Schendel was in her late teens when her family moved to Milan, where she attended art school and studied philosophy at Catholic University. Because of Nazi persecution, Schendel joined a group of refugees fleeing to Sarajevo in 1941. She married a Croatian friend, Josip Hargesheimer, to facilitate her exit visa, and they left for Rome to work for the International Organization of Refugees. In 1949, Schendel arrived in Brazil. In 1951, she exhibited a series of spare still lifes in the first São Paulo Bienal. Schendel then relocated from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo, where she met Brazilian Concrete artists. (She also met the bookseller Knut Schendel and married him in 1960.) Her tendency toward abstraction grew along with her misgivings about the Concrete movement’s quest for scientific rationality in art. Schendel did feel an affinity with the movement’s poets; she experimented extensively with letters and graphic symbols in purposefully imprecise configurations on rice paper. The modesty and translucency of that medium and the repetitive nature of her process revealed the artist’s growing interest in Asian philosophy. Schendel joined a Zen meditation group in 1978.Her use of paper led to an intimate understanding of the medium. She twisted and tied it into sculptural Droguinhas (Little Nothings) and suspended numerous sheets face-to-face from transparent fishing line to make Trenzinhos (Little Trains). Schendel died in 1988.