Mira Schendel (1919 - 1988) is known for the diversity of series of works
she developed exploring the relationship between language, supports and
techniques used. It is not by chance that the artist’s training in Milan
includes the study of art-philosophy, and during her artistic life, as early
as 1946, in the post-war period in Europe, she will absorb theories on the
revalidation of art as a gesture, as zone of activity, where a thought appears
linked to the etymologies and the contrasts of the form.
The dresses (design and painting on fabric) are Mira’s rarest works because they come from the artist’s inseparable spirit of breaking the art-life membrane. She used
to make everyday objects. From a passion for embroidery and knitting,
practices that in some cases emigrated from her works, also detaching these
forms. Whether as an appeal to transform writing, whether as written lines
transforming themselves into “things”, or to invent a new reality in their
surroundings, or even to unravel the ambiguity between “text” and “fabric”
is that she creates these dresses. Like his work in general, which today is
considered a seminal legacy of Brazilian modernism, this series oscillates
between minimalism and synthesis, between presence and absence.