Mira Schendel

Mira Schendel (born Myrrha Dagmar Dub in Zurich in 1919) was a painter, sculptress, and lyric poet. Born to a Jewish family in Switzerland and raised Catholic in Italy, she studied philosophy in Milan until she was forced to leave the university in 1939 due to her Jewishness. After stops in Sofia, Sarajevo, Milan, and Rome, she emigrated to Brazil in 1949 and settled in São Paulo in 1953. Shaped by her migration experiences and her particular interest in issues of philosophy, theology, and religious history, she developed a poetic oeuvre that posed existential questions and subverted the traditional hierarchy of genres. Schendel died in 1988 in São Paulo.

Livro Obra, 1971
Livro Obra, 1973

Letraset on vegetable paper, each 18.5 x 31.5 cm

The works of Mira Schendel are characterized by her feeling to lose her own language as well as by the influence of Brazilian modernism. Following World War II, the artist emigrated to São Paulo, where she engaged in dialog with emigrant intellectuals from various disciplines. She dealt with questions concerning aesthetics and philosophy, especially in phenomenology, semiotics, and poetry, which were to shape her work as a self-taught artist. Schendel often combined imagery and language and made use of a reduced, concrete design vocabulary, inspired by the abstraction of Brazilian modernism under the influence of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. In numerous paintings on rice paper, she utilized words and speech fragments in German, Italian, and Portuguese – the languages that she herself spoke and was exposed to due to her history of migration. Her two books titled Livro Obra represent the mixture of European and Brazilian influences that shaped the intellectual life of the diaspora. Through poetry, the works explore the existential dimensions of emptiness, elusiveness, and silence, in the process also expressing the uprooting and reinvention that shaped the artist’s biography.