Bergamin & Gomide is delighted to present works by Mira Schendel (1919-1988) in Art Basel OVR: Pioneers, which takes place on the @artbasel's online platform, from March 24 to 27, 2021.
“The great empty space is something that moves me deeply” - Mira Schendel
Mira Schendel was a pioneering artist who gave rise to concerns and interests that have accompanied her since the beginning of her career, such as her fascination with the expression of emptiness, the experience of time, being in the world and the mysteries of transparency.
The project "Accident and synthesis on paper" features a selection of rare works produced in the 1960s and 1970s based on the artist's experiments with Japanese rice paper sheets.
“The great empty space is something that moves me deeply,” says Mira Schendel (1919-1988) in an interview with artist Jorge Guinle in 1981. The Swiss artist based in Brazil, where she moved to in 1949, developed and worked with her fascination around emptiness mainly through experiments with the numerous sheets of Japanese rice paper she received as a gift in the early 1960s. Creating series such as Monotypes [Monotipias] (1964-1967), Little Nothings [Droguinhas] (produced mainly during the second half of the 1960s) and Little Stubs [Toquinhos] (produced mainly between the end of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s), all present in this project, Schendel gave rise to concerns and interests that accompanied her since the beginning of her artistic career (although in a less evident manner), such as: the expression of emptiness, the experience of time, being in the world and the mysteries of transparency.
The Monotypes series is composed of about two thousand works produced by Schendel in a very original way, with the artist adapting the monotype printing technique so as to intervene on the rice paper without tearing it, given its delicacy and fragility. Thus, as Rodrigo Naves describes in his text “From behind” (1996): “Mira Schendel drew from behind the paper: she inked a sheet of glass, sprinkled it with a light layer of powder - so the paper would not immediately absorb the ink -, placed a sheet of rice paper on the glass, then traced her lines on the white surface, using her nail, her finger, or any other relatively pointed instrument to promote contact between the paper and the ink.” This way of drawing and marking the paper implies a detachment from the control over the final result, since the layers that make the technique viable act of their own accord, beyond the artist's control - and Mira seems to be interested in precisely these small accidents. In this way, we often see a semblance of blots, some lighter, others darker, around the precise and thin lines that delimit the emptiness of the paper, traces of the ink that penetrated a little deeper here and there.
Among the ways that activate the emptiness touched on by Schendel, the game played by the tracing of letters and the words that they sometimes create is a striking quality of the Monotypes. More relevant than attempting to interpret a hidden meaning in the work via the significance of the words that appear on the paper, Mira's writing engages due to the primordial way in which she explores language, as if wanting to return to its origins. Thus, we see a vocabulary composed of arrows, scribbles, erasures and cut words, rewritten, crossed out in ink and lines that speak of and with the world: be it the natural world (Umwelt: winter, frost), be it the social world (Mitwelt) or the inner world (Eigenwelt). Vilém Flusser calls these writings “pre-texts” in his essay “Inquiry on the origin of language” (1967) and indicates in a clear manner how we should view them: “Mira's writings are not texts. They don't talk about anything, therefore they cannot be read as representatives of something. They are pre-texts, i.e. versions that precede texts. They talk among themselves. They do not represent anything yet, though they border on it. Mira's pre-texts are quasi-symbolical.”
When developing the Little Nothings, Schendel further emphasizes her interest in paper itself and its expressive qualities. In such, the artist is no longer drawing on paper, but with paper, in a synthetical procedure that is neither austere nor resolute, but that demonstrates the artist's profound intimacy with her production. Mira comments, in letters dated 1965 and 1966 to Guy Brett, the importance of these Little Nothings (twisted and tangled little things whose name was given by the artist's daughter as a child) within her praxis: “I started a new piece, perhaps more important for me than any previous pieces. A ‘sculpture’ on the same rice paper as the drawings.” and “The word ‘sculpture’ used in this context sounds ridiculous, but what else could it be? This new piece means, to me, a step beyond the drawings.” Schendel is surprised by the use of the word sculpture because she sees her “objects” being born less from an intention to occupy space by adding volume, and more from an investigation on transparency and time's interaction with things. Still on the topic of “the objects she made”, she adds: “They emerged, in a way, from chance and curiosity.”
The Little Stubs presented in this selection bring on yet another facet of Mira's experiments with Japanese rice paper. Produced between 1972 and 1974, they differ from the acrylic Little Stubs of the late 1960s, maintaining the letraset transfers as a common element. The artist began working with letraset mainly in her series Graphic Objects (which she started producing in 1967), her cursive writing progressively giving way to what Max Bense dubs “graphic reductions” in the homonymous 1967 text. In these Little Stubs, Schendel creates layers by gluing, on the sheets of Japanese rice paper, squares of paper (dyed or not) usually accompanied by punctuation marks and/or letters. In the same text, Bense also comments aspects of Mira's work that are reaffirmed in this composition: “Her graphic reduction suspends the linguistic structure in favor of the pictorial. A letter behaves like a dot, the sequence of letters like a line, and several letter-lines determine surfaces, bypassing oropening them up in space. (...) Words, which become noticeable, will be causal events-of-words in the visual path of the finger's traces on the paper.”
