Mira Schendel, baptized as Myrrha Dagmar Dub, was born in Zurich at a time of mounting antisemitism in Western Europe. The only daughter of Karl Leo Dub, from a Jewish Czech family, and Ada Saveria, whose father was German and mother Italian, Mira Schendel grows up in Italy after her mother's marriage to Count Tomaso Gnoli, then the director of Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, in Modena.
Between 1930 and 1936, she started taking nondegree art courses in drawing. In 1937, she began attending Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, where she studied Philosophy. Rising fascism and antisemitism at the onset of World War II forced her to abandon her studies, as a decree banned foreign Jews from attending higher education institutions. Despite having been baptized and raised in the Catholic faith, Mira was considered a Jew due to her paternal lineage. In 1939, she leaves Italy at a time of hardship and moves from country to country in Eastern Europe. After World War II ends, Mira returns to Italy alongside her husband, Jossip Hargesheimer, settling first in Milan and then in Rome. In 1949, they migrate to Brazil, initially settling in Porto Alegre.
Registered in the new country under her married name—Mirra Hargesheimer—, Mira takes up painting and pottery and attends the Porto Alegre School of Fine Arts, while working at typography shop Tipografia Mercantil. In 1950, Mira has her first solo show, exhibiting her paintings at the auditorium of the Correio do Povo daily, including portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. Encouraged by positive reactions, Mira applied to exhibit at the 1st Bienal de São Paulo, in 1951, and a painting of hers got selected by the jury. Two years later, in 1953, she moves to São Paulo and quickly rises to prominence in the national art scene amid a postwar cultural boom with the opening of modern art museums and the inception of the Bienal de São Paulo. During her first years in the city, she built close ties with a circle of thinkers who would soon become her friends, interlocutors, and first critics: Mário Schenberg (1914-1990), Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003), Theon Spanudis (1915-1986), and Vilém Flusser (1920-1991). In 1960, Mira marries the bookseller Knut Schendel, with whom she had her only daughter, Ada Clara.
In the 1960s, upon being gifted a large amount of Japanese rice paper by Mário Schenberg, Mira starts creating works featuring a growing sense of void and spatiality. Dating from this period are some of her main groups of works, such as Trenzinho, Droguinhas, Objetos Gráficos, and her monotype prints. At the same time, Mira continues to create more figurative work, including drawings, paintings, and collages. In the second half of the 1960s, she returns to Europe for the first time since migrating and has her work exhibited in Lisbon, London, and at the 34th edition of La Biennale di Venezia, in 1968.
The 1970s are marked by transformations in her work. In addition to her concerns with language, corporeity, and transparency, which informed the graphic elements in her Toquinhos with letraset lettering and paper, Mira also starts experimenting with new motifs. During this decade, she creates her Mandalas and her I Ching paintings and drawings, which were featured at the 16th Bienal de São Paulo, in 1981. In 1974, she created the Datiloscritos series, which saw her type out letters, signs, words, and sentences using a large-cylinder typewriter. During this period, she also makes a series of paintings on paper that can be viewed as the genesis of the tempera and gold leaf paintings she would develop in greater number in the following decade.
Her tempera paintings with applied gold leaf were exhibited in 1979 at the 11th Panorama da Arte Brasileira, a show held at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, but would only be shown solo in 1982 at Galeria Paulo Figueiredo, also in São Paulo. In the 1980s, Mira creates her Sarrafos, twelve largescale white tempera and plaster paintings with wood strips painted in black tempera and screwed onto the pictorial surface. During this period, she also created artworks using brick dust on wood that visually hearken back to some of her 1960s work.
Mira's prolific output, which elevates her to the status of one of the premier Brazilian 20th century artists, continues to be featured constantly at major museums and art institutions. In April 1966, on occasion of her solo show at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, the concrete poet Haroldo de Campos wrote that Mira's work is “an art of voids where extreme redundancy starts to generate original information; an art of words where the graphic sign dresses and undresses, veils and unveils." In the same poem, the poet continues: “an art-scripture of cosmic word dust, a semiotic art of icons, indices, symbols that leaves its numinous tracks upon the white of the page—such is the art of Mira Schendel.”
Recent solo shows of hers include Esperar que a letra se forme, curated by Paulo Miyada and Galciani Neves at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake (São Paulo, 2024); Sinais/Signals, curated by Paulo Venâncio Filho at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (São Paulo, 2018); Mira Schendel, curated by Tanya Barson and Taísa Palhares at the Tate Modern (London, 2013), at Pinacoteca de São Paulo (São Paulo, 2014), and at Fundação Serralves (Porto, 2014); and Mira Schendel, at the Galerie National du Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2001). In 2009, Mira's works were shown alongside work by León Ferrari in an exhibition curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas, titled Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel, held at The Museum of Modern Art – MoMA (New York, 2009), with stints at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2009) and at Fundação Iberê Camargo (Porto Alegre, 2010). Her works are in the collections of institutions including: Pinacoteca de São Paulo; the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP); the Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio); the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP); Museo Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA); Glenstone Museum, in Potomac, Maryland, US; The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC); The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), in Houston; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), in Miami; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in Nova York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Kunstsammlungen Museen, in Nuremberg; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS), in Madrid; Tate Modern, in London, among others.