LONDON.- Lisson announced representation of the Estate of Mira Schendel, collaborating globally with Gomide & Co, São Paulo.

In 2027, Lisson New York will present an extensive survey of the artist’s works on paper, including a never-before-seen series of drawings. Paper, after all, was one of the defining media of Schendel’s oeuvre: not only was it featured in many of her most important works but it helped distinguish her from her contemporaries. To shed further light on Schendel’s practice ahead of this forthcoming solo show, Lisson will spotlight the artist’s work in a group exhibition in November this year. Also this Autumn, Luxembourg + Co., London, will present Mira Schendel: In Transit (opening 12 October), featuring paintings and works on paper from the 1950s through the 1980s, alongside a complementary display of Schendel’s work in a solo presentation at Frieze Masters. The presentation marks Schendel’s first exhibition in London in over a decade, following her landmark 2013 retrospective at Tate Modern. Coinciding with the exhibition is the publication of a new book by Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, in partnership with Luxembourg + Co., Gomide & Co and Lisson, which explores the relationship between colour and language in Schendel’s work and contributes to ongoing scholarship around her practice.

Lisson will be representing the Estate given Schendel’s historic relationship with the gallery. The Swiss-born, Brazil-based artist first exhibited at Lisson in 1968, in two subsequent shows, after meeting Founder Nicholas Logsdail in the 1960s. Following Alex Logsdail’s visits to São Paulo over the past decade, and given Schendel’s ties to Lisson’s programme and roster – Hélio Oiticica, for example, was one of the key influences on the development of her experimental artistic style –, it is a privilege to share her oeuvre with audiences worldwide.

Alex Logsdail, CEO of Lisson, says: “Having been an admirer of Mira Schendel’s work for many years, and given her long history with Lisson, we are thrilled to announce representation of the Estate of Schendel. She was an absolute visionary; her practice informed ideas around abstraction, language and concrete poetry, and speaks to inherent beauty. What’s particularly exciting about working with the Estate is the chance to exhibit large bodies of work that have rarely, if ever, been shown publicly. We are also delighted to establish this new relationship with the major acquisition of Still Waves of Probability (1969), a particularly significant site-specific installation by Schendel, to Dia Art Foundation, New York, with the generous support of Ken Griffin.”





Mira Schendel (1919–1988) was indeed one of the most prolific artists and visionaries of the twentieth century. Cultivating an expansive practice throughout more than four decades, Schendel experimented across form and media. She incorporated paper, paint, fabric and acrylic to establish a unique visual language in which letters, numbers, geometric forms and textual fragments oscillate between image and sign. Rather than aligning with any style or artistic movement, her oeuvre occupies a singular position in the history of art, foregrounding the possibility of writing becoming an aesthetic medium, form merging with language, and the boundaries between object and environment continually dissolving.

While Schendel began her career with figurative paintings of still lifes, landscapes and interiors, she later gained renown for her experiments on paper, most notably her Monotipias (Monotypes). These works emerged following a gift of Japanese rice paper from the physicist and art critic Mário Schenberg, whom she met through São Paulo’s intellectual circles upon her arrival to the city in 1953. In them, she approached rice paper as a structural material, working directly onto its delicate, translucent surface to form constellations of words and images, or to evoke spatial voids interrupted by occasional lines. The result is works that remain open-ended and provisional, instead of pursuing a fixed narrative or stylistic language, and push the delineations between chaos and meaning, thereby expressing Schendel’s sustained engagement with philosophy, theology, physics and semiotics.

Schendel subsequently expanded her investigation of language and materiality into three-dimensional forms, from the knotted rice-paper structures of Droguinhas (Little Nothings) to the transparent acrylic Objetos gráficos (Graphic Objects), where letters, words and symbols hover between image and object. Across these works, Schendel increasingly treated language not as a system of fixed meanings, but as a material and spatial presence, allowing words, symbols and forms to exist in states of suspension and transformation.

In the 1970s, seeking to engage with both spiritual and political concerns, she turned to acrylic works, paintings and installations. Ondas paradas de probabilidade (Still Waves of Probability) famously connected the translucence of its threads to silence and the presence of God, while also responding to the restrictions imposed on artistic activity under Brazil’s military dictatorship; they thus brought together the spiritual and political dimensions of Schendel’s practice. The last decade of Schendel’s career witnessed the introduction of further materials – wood, among others – as a means to survey the interplay between language, geometry and space and render spare environments in which lines, letters and forms resist interpretation.

Schendel’s work has been the subject of major international exhibitions, including Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2009-2010), as well as the landmark presentation, Mira Schendel at Tate Modern, London, which travelled to the Fundação de Serralves, Portugal, and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2013-2014). Schendel also presented at the 39th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia; the 22nd International Biennial in São Paulo; the Museum of Modern Art in Paris; and the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona. Her work is held in many public and private art collections, including Tate Modern in the UK; Museum of Modern Art in New York and Art Institute of Chicago; Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand and Pinacoteca de São Paulo in Brazil; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.