Mira Schendel’s work stands out for its original way of blending lightness, energy, sensitivity and a strong intellectual motivation. Hardly aligned with any current of modern art, her work transcends the artistic debates of her time. Schendel produced paintings, sculptures, installations, drawings, printed and handmade books, and she was also a poet and graphic artist. The relationship between image and word, the limits of language and perception, and her engagement with philosophy, in particular phenomenology, are fundamental aspects of her career. 

Born in Switzerland, Schendel lived in Italy during the 1930s, where she studied philosophy, theology and art. The need to flee Nazi persecution led Schendel to live in various European cities, and in 1949 she moved to Brazil, settling first in Porto Alegre and later in São Paulo. In the 1960s, she began to create series named according to the working process adopted, in which the detachment from the technical mastery traditionally associated with drawing stands out, as does the breaking down of hierarchies, for example between the figure and the background, or the empty space of the paper, which gained increasing autonomy in later works. Mira Schendel has also worked with plexiglass, which allowed her to explore the qualities of transparency and lightness. The limit of expressiveness is linked to Schendel’s interest in emptiness and silence, themes that run throughout her production. 

Her work was featured in several editions of the Bienal de São Paulo (1951, 1955, 1963, 1965, 1967, 1969, 1981, 1989, 1994, 1998 and 2010) and since the 1960s the artist has exhibited at prestigious international institutions such as the 34th Venice Biennale, Italy (1968), and the Signals Gallery, London, UK (1966), a place of intense exchange for Brazilian and foreign avant-garde artists. In 2013, Schendel had a solo show at the Tate Modern, London, UK, presented in 2014 at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil. In 2024, a retrospective of her work was held at the Tomie Ohtake Institute, São Paulo, Brazil. Her work is part of major public and private collections, including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Spain; MoMa, USA; Tate Modern, UK; and Museum of Fine Arts Houston, USA; as well as institutional collections in Brazil, including: Pinacoteca de São Paulo; MAM São Paulo; Museu de Arte Contemporânea da USP – MAC USP; Itaú Cultural; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói; among others.