Untitled Rhythmic Abstraction

Myra Landau

Romanian-born artist Myra Landau had become a citizen of Mexico in 1960 and, in 1965 she began a series of artworks; drawings, paintings, and textiles, all under the concept of "Rhythms". Her website bio states that these works were: "...at once spontaneous and analytic compositions of lines and colors that played 'on the relationship between a structural model and an aesthetic object...a system of forces...'" Her work has been described as being "musical" and "vibrant".

This drawing is inscribed and signed in white pigment in the lower right: "Para un enfermaro perfecta" (For a perfect nurse), and was perhaps a gift.

Myra Landau, painter, educator, writer, and art researcher, was born on 5 December 1926 in Bucharest, Romania. Fearing persecution, her family fled Romania in April of 1940 and by November of that year arrived in Rio de Janeiro. In Brazil, she met many artists who encouraged her to paint. As a self-taught artist, Landau was highly inquisitive and innovative. She explored abstraction by using movements of geometrical lines and created her own painting style by brushing pastels on linen.

In the early 1960s, Landau moved to Mexico, where she participated in the national art scene. There she joined the Salon Independiente, which was an activist group that protested the Mexican government's Tlatelolco student massacre in 1968. Landau was hired as a professor at the Faculty of Visual Arts at the Universidad Veracruzana in 1974 and the following year she became a full-time researcher for the Institute of Aesthetics and Artistic Creation at the same university.

Landau moved to Italy in 1994, Israel in 2010, and to The Netherlands in 2016. During her career, she had over sixty solo exhibitions and over 100 group exhibitions worldwide. An exhibition of her work was mounted in 2024 at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City.

Myra Landau died in Alkmaar, The Netherlands, on 14 July 2018.