Born Myrrha Dagmar Dub (1919), in Switzerland, Mira Schendel studied art and philosophy in Italy during the 1930s before eventually emmigrating to Brazil in 1949, where she made the majority of her life's work - painting, drawing, graphic design and sculpture. Participating in the first Sao Paulo Biennial in 1951, Schendel soon found herself among the intellectual elite and began to show her work frequently. Her early paintings, in dense tones and textured surfaces, stood apart from the prevailing Concretist movement and suggested dissatisfaction with pictorial means. Her work is characterised by a variation in materials, from plaited and twisted rice paper, to acrylic paintings, to black and white temperas, and a series of paintings using brick dust. This volume looks at her work.