Mira Schendel valuation

Mira Schendel (1919–1988) was born in Zurich and grew up in Milan, where she studied philosophy at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore until Italy's racial laws forced her to leave. She spent the war years in Yugoslavia, lived in Rome afterwards, and in 1949 emigrated to Brazil, settling in São Paulo in 1953. There she found a circle of émigré intellectuals, among them the philosopher Vilém Flusser and the physicist Mário Schenberg, and became a prolific painter and sculptor whose work draws on language, philosophy and religion. Her early paintings mixed paint with talc and brick dust. In 1964 she began to make monotype drawings on rice paper, a gift from Schenberg, producing almost two thousand of them in two years, and the same paper led to the Droguinhas (Little Nothings), soft sculptures of knotted rice paper, and the Objetos gráficos (Graphic objects) of 1967. She showed at the first São Paulo Bienal and many later editions, and at the 1968 Venice Biennale, and in 2013 Tate Modern and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo organised a major exhibition of her work.

Her work includes paintings, monotypes and drawings on very thin rice paper, and objects in paper and acrylic. Rice paper is fragile, so check for tears, staining and fading, and keep works on paper behind glazing that filters ultraviolet light. The title, date and any gallery invoice should stay with the work.