Mira Schendel, Tate Modern

A treat when in London last week was seeing the work of Mira Schendel in the retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern. Schendel is an artist I was not previously aware of - a European emigrée to Brasil whose work encompassed painting, drawing, collage, sculpture and installation. In particular her text-based works were striking examples of an art that floated somewhere between concrete poetry, typographic experiments, the practices of the lettristes and a form of abstract visual art in which layers of words, syllables, letters, symbols and graphic marks combine on surfaces that are both observed and read simultaneously.  Another stand-out work was an installation of hanging (nylon?) threads that formed a kind of cloud in the space, so that audience members at the other side of the installation appeared to melt into the material of the artwork.