Mira Schendel (1919-1988)

Mira Schendel arrived in Brazil in 1949 after a tortuous journey fleeing Nazi Europe. It was in Brazil that she was able to freely express her highly personal attitude towards philosophy and art. Although part of the artistic milieu of Brazil in the fifties, she remained at margin because of her more radical ideas of process-oriented art and by the idea of action. Schendel started painting on the early fifties, in subdued tones, contained in the prudent intermediacy between abstraction and figurative art. In her painting, elemental forms, saturated with material or pigment, emerge onto the flat surface of the composition creating a tense balance between the rigorous formal composition and the expressive rendering of the material.