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091213: Tate Modern - Mira Schendel
Tate Modern
Mira Schendel
25.09.2013 – 19.01.2014
Worlds within reach
By Goschka Gawlik
Art from Brazil is tops in 2013. No wonder that many galleries from this South American country were guests at the Frieze London and at the opening of the art fair, the art world celebrated the first international overview of Mira Schendel's work in the Tate Modern. Although the artist, who died in 1988, was not Brazilian-born – she was brought up as a Catholic child of Swiss emigrants with a Jewish background during the time of Fascism in Milan – she belongs, beside Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, to those pioneers who have reinvented the language of the modern. The 250 works in 14 rooms in the comprehensive exhibition show installative sculptures, drawings and pictures by the artist, and also among them some works previously never seen and some fascinating reconstructions. One of these is the installation, Still Waves of Probability, which premiered in 1969 at the at the Sao Paulo Biennial. Many artists, in protest against the military dictatorship, boycotted this biennial.
Mira Schendel was a lively intellectual with a multicultural background. She first studied philosophy. She began to paint constructively in the 1950's. Her interests lay in religion, literature, poetry, Chinese calligraphy, linguistics and mathematics, as well as game theories. She had ongoing, close contact with several scientists, authors and intellectuals such as, for example, Vilém Flusser, Max Bense or Umberto Eco. In her pictures, she gradually distanced herself from the constrictions of the two-dimensional surfaces and since 1964, she experimented with the textures of materials such as Japanese rice paper with its transmission and translucency. She painted or drew symbols, lines, numbers and above all, black Letraset letters in varied, often humorous-to-idiosyncratic constellations, on this, for her, newly discovered material. The exhibition in London appears effective and mobile in its central rooms because of the floating, ubiquitously distributed works, called Graphic Objects or Little Nothings – fragile textile sculptures in acrylic-covered paper strips which move slightly when one passes by them.
During the late 60's and 70's, Schendel's art was driven further by new ideas of transmission and furthermore, by the never-ending spiral-shaped catenation of graphic elements and single letters including their open meaning. The rules of western harmony interrupt eastern asymmetry, not only to convey more complex information - for the most part in series - but also to reveal the connections with their own existence. One of her famous monotypes which centres around the motive of emptiness, being and nothingness – concepts in different phenomenological languages, i.e. without including value judgement – consciously chosen in the German language, refer to the sociality of the environment, social world and own world. In her serialism, her monotypes tie up with the music of the minimalist, C.H. Stockhausen. In the series of drawings, Homage to God-Father of the West (1975), Schendel uses the spray technique to transmit fragments from the Old Testament. The transparent works allow the observer to have a plethora of perspectives and effectuate that Mira Schendel's works are not hallucinatorally constructed like modern, technical pictures. Schendel's art retains its ancient, magical meaning in the sense of Flusser by imaginatively adapting and repeating through an inaudible melody, the inner relationship between form and writing, emptiness and meaning, old and new.
Tate Modern
SE1 9TG London, Bankside
Tel: +44 20 7887 8000
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/default.htm
Opening times: Sunday to Thursday, 10.00-18.00 (galleries open at 10.15); Friday and Saturday, 10.00-22.00 (galleries open at 10.15); Last admission into exhibitions 17.15 (Fri and Sat 21.15); Closed 24, 25, 26 December
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
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091213
Tate Modern
SE1 9TG London, Bankside
Tel: +44 20 7887 8000
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/default.htm
Öffnungszeiten: Sunday to Thursday, 10.00-18.00 (galleries open at 10.15); Friday and Saturday, 10.00-22.00 (galleries open at 10.15); Last admission into exhibitions 17.15 (Fri and Sat 21.15);Closed 24, 25, 26 Decem
Tate Modern
SE1 9TG London, Bankside
Tel: +44 20 7887 8000
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/default.htm
Öffnungszeiten: Sunday to Thursday, 10.00-18.00 (galleries open at 10.15); Friday and Saturday, 10.00-22.00 (galleries open at 10.15); Last admission into exhibitions 17.15 (Fri and Sat 21.15);Closed 24, 25, 26 Decem
