Mira Schendel, Tate Modern

We’re expecting to hear a lot about Brasil in 2014. It’s the football World Cup, after all, and many will be looking at the emerging power nation of Latin America anew. 

Hopefully it will introduce a new generation to the delights of Brasilian art. And while there's a lot of current interest in contemporary artists and designers such as Beatrice Milhaze and the Campana Brothers, a historical story is also starting to emerge, including artists like Mira Schendel, subject of an exhibition at Tate Modern and the perfect complement to the current Paul Klee show. 

Since it opened, Tate Modern has worked hard to put on the work of artists from outside the US-Europe axis, and it seems odd that this is the first major international exhibition of Schendel’s work. Not only did the artist have one of those amazing lives at which the volatile early-mid-20th century excelled at producing – Jewish, Swiss-born, raised as a Catholic in Italy, fled to Sarajevo, married a Croat, went to Brazil - her work is also fascinating: like stumbling across a new language that contains glimmers of recognition. Here you'll find 250 paintings, drawings and sculptures, and some of her paintings use symbols and typography as if written in a secret script: painters like Cy Twombly come to mind, as do the muted and monomaniacal re-renderings of vases by Italian artist Giorgio Morandi. In her paintings Graphic Object and Untitled 1962 you can see aspects of European modernism, Bauhaus and Constructivism, put through a new Brazilian prism. 

There’s a slightly obsessive quality to her works that keeps you looking at them. Schendel worked with poor materials, which recalls the Italian modernist movement Arte Povera. One remembers that she did so because she was poor, but also that her work represents a great interest in 20th century intellectual currents: Schendel was highly interested in thought and philosophy. To that end, she complements the great Brazilian modernist architects, Oscar Neimeyer and Roberto Burle-Marx. 

That many of us will not have heard of her illustrates just how US- and Eurocentric our art world has been. Schendel is well known in Brazil and exhibited at the 1969 Venice Biennale. It's good that she's being shown now, and the pairing with Klee is inspired.

Admission: £11 / £9.50
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