On Tuesday New York’s Hauser & Wirth announced that it will henceforth handle the estate of late Brazilian artist Mira Schendel, who died in 1988, and who is currently the subject of a major survey exhibition at Tate Modern — which will travel on to Porto and then Sao Paulo, the city in which she spent most of her life. In 2009 the Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition pairing Schendel’s work with that of the Argentine artist León Ferrari.

Though she rose to prominence in the 1950s for her abstract paintings made up of large geometric forms, she remains best-known for the direction her practice took in subsequent decades. She developed a unique and intricate practice of creating vast patterns on paper, some rendered in thin ink lines, others made up of typeset letters.

Schendel was born in 1919 in Zurich, Switzerland. Her parents were German-speaking and Jewish, though she was raised Catholic. She spent much of her childhood in Milan, where her mother moved after her parents divorced, and where she studied art between 1930-36. Schendel fled Italy on the eve of World War II, settling in Sarajevo, where she met and married Jossip Hargesheimer. Immediately following the war the couple settled in Rome, but decide to emigrate to Brazil in 1949, where Schendel began to create ceramics and paintings, while studying sculpture and drawing at Porto Alegre’s Fine Arts School.

She had her first solo show in Brazil in October 1950, and participated in the inaugural Sao Paulo Modern Art Biennial the following year. She exhibited in Brazil and Europe thereafter, including shows at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Galeria Paulo Figueiredo in Sao Paulo, Signals in London, and the Venice Biennale, where she represented Brazil in 1968. She died of lung cancer on July 24, 1988, at the age of 69.