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Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari e Mira Schendel
León Ferrari and Mira Schendel figure among the most prominent Latin American artists of the twentieth century. Although they never met during the time when they were active in the neighboring countries of Argentina and Brazil in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, both produced an oeuvre addressing language visually and as subject matter.
Ferrari was born in Argentina in 1920. He has worked with a wide range of art forms and mediums, from sculpture, painting, drawing, and assemblage to film, collage, mail art, poetry, and sound. While living temporarily in Italy in the 1950s, he made ceramic sculptures stylistically connected to the European abstraction of the time. On returning to Argentina, he produced drawings in which organic, gestural forms appear both as abstractions and explorations of the codes of writing. He also produced sculptures with metal wires and rods translating his graphic repertoire into three-dimensional forms. Deeply concerned with the ethical role of the artist, Ferrari has always fused his avant-garde formal interests with a political, confrontational kind of art while constantly endowing his production with criticism of Judeo-Christian morality, the established powers of government and all forms of religious intolerance. He lives in Buenos Aires and is still intensely active on Argentina’s contemporary art scene.
Born in Zurich in 1919, Schendel moved with her family to Italy while still an infant. Raised as a Catholic despite her Jewish origin, in 1936 she enrolled at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan to study philosophy, but three years later, in the face of anti-Semitic persecution, she fled into exile, finally becoming a refugee in Croatia. At the end of World War II she left Europe for Brazil, where she embarked on a career as an artist, first as a ceramist and later as a painter. Beginning in the 1960s she produced a large number of works on paper with techniques she herself had devised and reflecting her research into the expressive qualities of gesture and writing and her interest in transparency as represented by her Graphic Objects, which consisted of accumulations of signs between transparent acrylic sheets in the form of illegible palimpsests. In the late 1960s she turned her attention to abstract sculpture with Japanese paper, which she intricately knotted or simply exhibited as a series of shrouds. Until her death in São Paulo in 1988, she continued to experiment with forms and materials, researching the various forms of graphic inscription and the unrepresentable limits of her own voice.
Schendel and Ferrari were active at a time marked by the use of linguistic models—semiotics, structuralism, philosophies of language—to understand the world and a period when many intellectuals made language a paradigm for both thought and the world itself. Unlike the American and European Conceptual artists of their time, Ferrari and Schendel did not use language as a mere vehicle for expressing concepts, ideas or neutral performative events but as a physical, opaque, confused and ambiguous medium capable of endless shaping and molding. Art of language and language of art interlace in works in which both artists reflected life’s many challenges.
This exhibition was organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, under the auspices of its International Council in collaboration with the Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, and.the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.
Luis Pérez-Oramas |
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