Mira Schendel

Mira Schendel or Myrrha Dagmar Dub (Zurich, June 7, 1919 - São Paulo, July 24, 1988) was a Swiss artist settled in Brazil, today considered one of the exponents of Brazilian contemporary art. Her father was Czechoslovakian, from a Jewish family, while her mother was the daughter of a German and an Italian of Jewish origin, converted to Catholicism. Her parents separated when Mira was still a baby, and her mother remarried an Italian count. In Milan in the 1930s, she studied philosophy at the Catholic University and, from 1936, also attended art school. During the Second World War, she ended up abandoning her studies. In 1941, he went to Sofia, in Bulgaria, fleeing Nazi persecution. She ends up in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, where she marries Josip Hargesheimer, in order to obtain permission to emigrate. In the immediate post-war period, between 1946 and January 1949, the couple stays in Rome. Mira is considered a "displaced person" in the jargon of the authorities and works at the International Organization for Refugees. During this time she corresponded with the theologian Ferdinando Tartaglia.[1] Finally she obtained permission to come to Brazil, arriving in Rio de Janeiro on January 12, 1949. He then settled in Porto Alegre. There, besides painting, he gave classes and worked with ceramics. He also studied and published poetry. She would sign her works with the surname Hargesheimer until 1953. Mira Schendel: Untitled, 1956. Mira Schendel: Untitled, 1956. Her early modern works are marked by a certain rigidity and detachment, similar to Morandi's still lifes of the mid-1950s. Haroldo de Campos, who was close to Mira, said in an interview with Sônia Salzstein that Mira "felt that which Julio Cortázar called 'the difficulty of being at all': she felt sort of exiled".[2] Her participation in the 1st São Paulo International Biennale, in 1951, allowed her contact with international experiences and her insertion in the national scene. Two years later, in 1953, she moved to São Paulo, where she met the German bookseller Knut Schendel, who became the father of her only son and later her husband. Mira adopted the surname Schendel. In the 1960s she produced over four thousand drawings using the technique of monotype on rice paper. These are divided into subgroups, nicknamed "lines", "architectures" (u-shaped lines), "letters" (alphabet and mathematical symbols) and "scripts" (in various languages). In 1966, after the presentation in London of his series Droguinhas, made with twisted rice-paper, he met the philosopher and semiologist Max Bense (1910-1990), who contributed to one of his exhibitions and with whom he corresponded until 1975. The acrylic pieces date from 1968, when she produces works such as Objetos Gráficos and Toquinhos. Between 1970 and 1971 she produced a set of 150 notebooks, divided into several series. In the 1980s, she produced black and white tempera prints, Sarrafos, and began a series of paintings with brick dust. After his death, many exhibitions presented his work in Brazil and abroad. In 1994, the 22nd São Paulo International Biennial dedicated a special room to him. In 1997, the art dealer Paulo Figueiredo donates a large number of the artist's works to the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM/SP) - in tribute to his generosity the museum decides to give his name to one of its exhibition rooms, today the Paulo Figueiredo Room. The artist is represented in the following collections: MoMA (the first work was donated by Luisa Strina), Tate Modern in London, MAC-USP, Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR, donations from Fundo Z), MAC-Niterói, Fundação Edson Queiroz in Fortaleza, among others. At the beginning of 2009, an epistemological leap occurred with the publication by the Cosacnaify publishing house of Geraldo Souza Dias' thesis, defended in Germany. Souza Dias is one of the few Brazilian theoreticians to write about Schendel and master the German language, the basic language for the artist. This publication will benefit the whole environment, from MoMA to Cebrap at USP.

Por: Sala Rússia