For Schendel, 1964 was a year of daring artistic experimentation. She oscillated between representation and abstraction and explored new materials, such as rice paper and the red earth of São Paulo, which she mixed with her oil paints. Here, Schendel strips painting of its canvas to expose its coarse wooden stretcher hammered with nails. Crude yet vulnerable, this grid presents itself not as an optical schema but rather as a constructed object with a tactile dimension. The artist noted, “I give the utmost importance to [art] being manual like this, that it be handmade, that it be experienced.”
Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction—The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift, October 21, 2019–March 14, 2020
Provenance
The artist.
[Mario Schenberg, São Paulo]
2005 - 2016, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York, and Caracas, purchased through Christie's, New York, Latin American Paintings, lot 55, November 15 - 16, 2005.
2016, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired as promised gift from Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.
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Mira Schendel
Brazilian, born Switzerland. 1919–1988 60 works onlineIn the early 1960s, the artist Mira Schendel received a large gift of thin Japanese paper. It transformed her practice, giving rise to thousands of Monotipias and culminating in her Objetos gráficos of the 1970s, made while she dedicated a decade to the investigation of the medium of drawing and its potential.
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