Hannah Hoffman Gallery is pleased to present its inaugural exhibition Mira Schendel opening Sunday, May 19th at 1010 N. Highland Avenue, Los Angeles. The exhibition will mark the first significant showing of the artist’s work in this city since the 1999 exhibition Experimental Exercise of Freedom at LA MOCA and concurrent solo show at the Cristopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica.

Mira Schendel will feature a constellation of Schendel’s work from many periods of her production, including early painted work, her groundbreaking Monotipias [Monotypes], and works from the emblematic series that follow, including her Discos [Disks], Cadernos [Notebooks], Toquinhos [Little Pieces], and Datiloscritos [Typewritings]. At the center of the exhibition are two of her rare and iconic Objetos Gráficos, [Graphic Objects] made from 1967 to 1973 and first exhibited in 1968 at the Venice Biennial.

Mira Schendel is curated by Beverly Adams, curator of the Diane and Bruce Halle Collection, a collection of 20th and 21st century art from Latin America in Phoenix, Arizona.

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an art of voids
where the utmost redundancy begins to produce original information
an art of words and quasi-words
where the graphic form veils and unveils seals and unseals
sudden semantic values
an art of constellated alphabets
of beelike letters swarming and solitary
all-pha-bbb-ees
where the digit scatters its avatars
and longs shifting for the ideogram of itself
where digital is driven to become analogical
an art of lines that sink
and stand fronting by a minimal vertigo of space
notwithstanding full of starlight
immeasurable distances
an art where colour may be the name of the colour
and figure the comment on the figure
to let wonder go free again
between sense and sign
a scripictorial art
out of the cosmic dust of words
a semiotic art of icons indexes symbols
which print on the blank of the page
their numinous form
this is the art of mira schendel

to enter the planetarium where her drawings
like starry patterns hang
and hear the silence as a bird of inwards
as a perch of almost
twittering its absolute haiku

– Haroldo de Campos, April 1966

Translasted by Haroldo de Campos. Text first published in the catalog Mira Schendel, Rio de Janeiro, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; May 1966.