FRIEZE MASTERS 2026

Born Myrrha Dagmar Dub in 1919 in Zurich, Schendel was brought up in Italy until the age of twenty when she escaped to Yugoslavia at the start of the war before migrating to Brazil in 1949 where she would find her mature artistic voice. Schendel’s artistic methods range across painting, sculpture, drawing and monotype printing, depicting loosely arranged letters and words, as well as enigmatic line compositions and delineated fields of colour in different textures and media. These means of expression served Schendel in an attempt to cross over the limits of language as we know it – a restrictive and disciplined frame. By transforming surface and symbol into sites of bodily experience Schendel’s art offers to open-up language and allow “the unutterable to enter it toward the totally different”.

Luxembourg + Co.’s presentation at Frieze is organised in collaboration with the artist’s estate and marks the publication of a new book that explores the artist’s original use of materials as means to define drawing and painting in spatial and sculptural terms.