The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel is the first major museum retrospective in the United States to survey the work of León Ferrari (Argentine, b. 1920) and Mira Schendel (Brazilian, b. Switzerland, 1919–1988), and to explore their significant contributions to contemporary art. Working separately over several decades in neighboring Latin American countries during the latter half of the twentieth century, each created an oeuvre of works of art fundamentally based in language.

At a time when Western artists were incorporating letters, words, text, and language as a functional component of their art, Ferrari and Schendel distinctively addressed language as a major visual subject matter, considering the material body of language, its manifestation as a written word and voice, and its use as a metaphor for the human world. As contemporaries, though never collaborators, the two artists shared experiences of disillusion and exile that determined parallels and divergences in the art they produced.

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