Mira Schendel

IN THE DRAWINGS of Mira Schendel, text and image often coalesce over creamy backgrounds, as if the two should be read as one. The well-known “Objeto Gráfico”series shows letters clumped in thickets; in other works, they are transposed over each other or stretched out over a blank background—either way, they never spell out anything but their shape. This catalogue, published alongside Schendel’s recent retrospective at the Tate, is thick with reproductions of these pieces, along with lesser-known sculptures and installations for which the spiral frequently acts as an organizing principle: Letters

culture Feb/Mar 2014

Lutz Bacher: Snow

HOW DOES a contemporary artist take on the cosmic? Last year, Lutz Bacher dumped hundreds of pounds of smashed coal slag onto the floor of a darkened exhibition hall. She then planted black television sets and shattered mirrors into the piles of soot. There is a single picture of this installation, titled Black Beauty, from 2012, in Snow, the artist’s first major monograph, which covers nearly four decades of her work. The photograph looks as if it has been xeroxed onto the page. It shows a close-up of the shimmering black coal and is conspicuously devoid of the details that account for the