Mira Schendel (Tate Modern, London: Exhibition Catalogues)

This stunning book accompanies the first full-scale survey of the dynamic work of Swiss-born Brazilian artist Mira Schendel (1919 1988). Alongside her contemporaries Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica, Schendel reinvented the language of European modernism in Brazil. Her work is characterized by a variation in materials, from braided, twisted rice paper to acrylic paint­ings to black-and-white temperas and a series of paintings using brick dust. During the height of her artistic powers, her work often focused on the visual component of language using letters, words, and phonetic combinations to highlight the gestural and sudden semantic value” of the writ­ten word. After her death in 1988 her work was shown extensively around the world, culminating in a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2009.