BORËD | Artist Spotlight | Mira Schendel

Mira Schendel was a Gemini born in Switzerland on June 7th, 1919. She was known for her subtle paintings, sculptures, and prints. She was raised in Italy as a Roman Catholic by her mother and stepfather. The daughter of a German-speaking Czech Jew and a Jewish-Christian Italian mother, Mira Schendel spent her childhood and adolescence in Milan.

In 1938, while a student of philosophy in Milan, she was designated ethnically Jewish and persecuted by Mussolini’s fascist regime. Between 1941 and 1949 her flight to escape Nazism and her post-war “displaced person” passport forced her into an itinerant exile in Austria that prevented her from pursuing her studies.

Later she emigrated to Brazil in 1949, settling in the city of São Paulo a few years later. Her awareness of having no particular attachment to either a country or a discipline, plus the double nature of her upbringing – Czech Judaism and Italian Catholicism – undoubtedly influenced her as a self-taught artist. At that time, Brazil was undergoing a cultural revolution and Schendel was soon immersed in a vibrant scene of artists and intellectuals, which included both Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica.

By the mid-1960s, she had begun producing her prolific series of over 2,000 monotypes on Japanese rice paper. Over the following decades, Schendel experimented with nylon-thread installations and paintings composed of tempera and gold leaf. The artist died on July 24, 1988 in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2013, she was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate Modern in London. Today, her works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, among others.

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