Exhibition "Mira Schendel: Transparency"

Luisa Strina announces the exhibition Mira Schendel: Transparencies. The artist (1919-1988) was a pioneering figure in Latin American art, worked with Strina in the 1980s, and exhibited at the gallery in 1981 and 1983.

Organized by Olivier Renaud-Clement in collaboration with the Schendel family and Hauser & Wirth, the exhibition brings together a wide selection of Schendel Monotypes, produced between 1963 and 1965, as well as a series of sculptural objects in acrylic from the late 1960s and 1970s. .Transparências is accompanied by an unpublished essay by the Chief Curator of the Museo del Barrio in New York, Rodrigo Moura.

“Transparency is at the center of this exhibition by Luisa Strina, where Mira Schendel held two exhibitions during her lifetime in the 1980s. Almost a quarter of the 21st century has passed, it is inescapable to ask what place is reserved for her work in Brazil and in today's world, when identity issues seem to have assumed a role that many consider preponderant in the cultural arena. Schendel resurfaces here as a beacon to illuminate the individual and irreducible character that lies at the heart of any great artist's work – and transparency presents us with a powerful image for this statement. Who can deny that her identity has informed her work – a European immigrant woman? That the experience of loss and diaspora is behind her drive for transcendence? That language is always about to collapse in her work, as only happens to those for whom language is never a guarantee? That her singular understanding of the modern project always pushes him to a kind of edge of the precipice, because she sees in it the sexist limitations of her original hegemonic aspirations?”, analyzes Moura.

The more than fifty Monotypes presented provide a panorama of Schendel's experimental and innovative approach. Each piece reveals his meticulous exploration of texture, shape and translucency, in a subtle play of light and shadow.

These works were extremely experimental at the time of their creation. This process involves applying talcum powder to one side of Japanese tissue paper, which is placed on a previously oiled glass plate. Schendel “drawn” with various instruments, including his fingers, applying pressure to the unoiled side.

The process created an organic line that almost looked like part of the paper and allowed Schendel to respond gesturally and calligraphically to the material. These graphic marks, letters and stains resulted in extraordinarily beautiful and poetic drawings on both sides of the paper, which are displayed in the gallery on backlit shelves, which preserve their transparency.

In Schendel's following works, transparency presents itself as the catalyst for the viewer's experience with the body and vision. The artist began using acrylic which, suspended in the air, allows the image and the plane to unfold in two: to see through and for a “circular reading in which the text is the immobile center, and the reader is mobile”, as stated the artist.

These formulations gave rise to Graphic Objects (1967-1973), in which sheets of paper are superimposed to create squares where the game of full and empty amplifies the graphic sign between silence and noise through repetition and changes in scale. Suspended by nylon thread, the works from the Transformable series are composed of small strips of transparent material articulated to evoke the sensation of mutability and play. They spin in the air, casting ever-changing shadows and reflections.

Also included in the exhibition are works from the Discos series, from the early 1970s, when Schendel began creating sculptural objects using acrylic and Letraset. Synthesizing the formal experimentation of the Monotypes, this body of work continued to embrace spiritual ideas about the “other side” of transparency, a place where other worlds and other forms of materiality existed.

The round discs are made from overlapping sheets of acrylic. They involve swirls of letters and symbols in Letraset, legible but untranslatable compositions. Here language is seen as a kind of cosmic dust, formless and infinite. “Mira Schendel is fundamental to the current artistic debate. Although rooted in experience, her work refutes reductive readings of identity, but also increasingly shows itself to be refractory to a strictu sensu formal interpretation. Perhaps, under the lens of transparency, this is its most striking feature”, concludes Rodrigo Moura.

Service
Exhibition | Mira Schendel: Transparencies
From August 01st to September 21st
Monday to Friday, 10am to 19pm, and Saturday, 10am to 17pm