In the first show of postwar Brazilian artist Mira Schendel at Hauser and Wirth since the gallery took on her estate in October 2013, private dealer Olivier Renaud-Clément brings together a wide-ranging group of more than 35 works that span some two decades (the exhibition runs through April 26 in New York). The earliest are from the mid-1960s, when Schendel first began making her best-known “Monotipias,” a translucent series of rice paper pieces that often feature a scattered letter motif. The latest include the artist’s final series of works in tempera and gesso on wood made one year before her death in 1988.
Without a unifying principal, this isn’t exactly a cohesive presentation, but it is an opportunity to see the career highlights of a notoriously prolific artist. One such standout is Ondas parades de probabilidade, an installation composed of thousands of nylon threads hanging from the ceiling to the floor. Schendel first created the piece for the controversial 1969 São Paulo Biennial that many artists boycotted in protest of Brazil’s military dictatorship. In a wall text that Schendel paired with the piece is a passage from the Old Testament’s 1 Kings 19 that tells the tale of God abandoning Elijah as a clever metaphor for the political upheaval of the time. A departure from her mostly monochrome palette, a suite of colorful ink-and-pastel drawings from the 1960s reveals a playfulness in the way she records shapes and colors. Hauser & Wirth’s addition of Schendel — one of the most influential Brazilian modernists and a long overlooked figure in the United States — is a welcome addition to the New York galleryscape.
A version of this article appears in the Summer 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
