Figures of Speech brings together works by Mira Schor created in 1985-87 and 2025-26. Set against this expansive arc, time reveals itself to be yet another material in addition to the unstretched canvas, the raw surfaces of the paintings from the 80s, and the earthy, intimate, warm palette. Beyond the vivid flow of Schor’s speech, there are languages disguised in the flesh of the paint, in the rustling of rice paper, in the air caressing the hanging dresses, in the immensity of a red horizon that is body, shadow, reverberation.

The words swim, stripped bare, emitting their own light in the vertical rivers of the body. Light can only be perceived when there is contrast. By hiding a face, an identity, the Masks create the necessary contrast for concealed luminosities to reveal themselves, allowing the inner flames of their bearers to flicker back to life. Mira Schor's Masks dissolve the obscured with their veils, layers, hollows, floating eyes, words that rise up like sculptures. Instead of concealing vulnerability, Schor exposes it. In 2025 she returns to this form she has worked only once before, in the year 1977. She does this again now, liberating those words--the jagged ones, the wet ones, the scientific ones, the utterly innocuous and general ones-- words banned by the current United States regime. She weaves them together with the fragility of rice paper, the opaque cries of the newspaper, the silence of paint. Silence can be white, extremely white, a light that burns. The metaphysical spaces of Schor’s silence teem with amniotic membranes, uteruses, unfurling movements, semen, and pools of absence where power is reexamined. 

Schor was eight years old, her feet inside the sacred labyrinth of the Chartres Cathedral, her gaze shrouded by the blue light of the stained-glass windows, when she first felt the impulse of verticality. She perceived the shelter of her brain beneath the 36-meter-high ceiling, the vault’s ribs like corridors of limestone, a continuous ascent far beyond the stones. 

Mira Schor’s vertical works are abstractions of the body. Verticality ascends towards an experience of the flesh where the spirit recognizes itself in waves and flayed figures. (Untitled) Widow, I Am Not My Mother, Caul of Self are some of the paintings that act as masked mirrors. The prevailing lights emerge from the rivers and the cavities of the body. These paintings defy gravity and mock death. They are white reflections in the waters of Figures of Speech, where they shimmer with words, textures, time, palimpsests, silences.

By Fernanda Ballesteros