Mira Schendel

26 September 2013–19 January 2014(Press view:24 September 2013)

Tate Modern, Level 4

Open every day from 10.00 – 18.00 and late until 22.00 on Friday and Saturday

For public information and tickets please print www.tate.org.uk or 020 7887 8888

Mira Schendel (1919-1988) was one of Latin America’s most important and prolific post-war artists. With her contemporaries Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica, Schendel reinvented the language of European Modernism in Brazil. In 2013 Tate Modern will stage the first ever international, full-scale survey of her work and the first large-scale solo Schendel exhibition in over 15 years. Realised in partnership with the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, it will bring together over 250 paintings, prints and sculptures from across her entire career, including works which have never been exhibited before.

Best known for her explorations of language, this exhibition will also highlight the artist’s engagement with other philosophical themes, including self-understanding, existence and faith. Having experienced both Jewish and Catholic culture during her upbringing, Schendel went on to study philosophy inMilanbefore emigrating to Brazil. This fusion of different cultures and systems of thought is evident in the words, numbers, lines and shapes which make up her work, often executed with a delicate human touch that subtly subverts European abstract art.

In São Paulo, Schendel developed an extraordinary intellectual circle that included the psychoanalyst and poet Theon Spanudis, the theoretical physicist and art critic Mario Schenberg, philosopher Vilem Flusser and Concrete poet Haroldo de Campos. The importance of these relationships is critical to an understanding of her development as an artist, and her key place in émigré circles in Brazil who were to have such an important impact on the post-war development of the nation. This intellectual milieu was also the basis for numerous correspondences with intellectuals in Europe. Thus the exhibition will place Schendel’s oeuvre within a broad international context and add a valuable analysis of Schendel’s principal concerns, rooted in and drawing on her own work and relationships, as well as her development of an experimental process.

 Mira Schendel was born Myrrha Dagmar Dub in Zurich in 1919. She lived in Milan and Rome before moving to Brazilin 1949. She settled in São Paolo in 1953, where she later married Knut Schendel and where she continued to live and work until her death in 1988. Exhibitions of her work include those at the Galeria de ArteSESI, São Pauloin 1997, the Museo Tamayo,Mexico City in 2004, and alongside León Ferrari in the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2009.