In the early 1960s, Mira Schendel developed her work in painting, which tended towards more abstract and less figurative investigations compared to those of the 1950s. When presented with an abundance of Japanese rice paper, she immersed herself in a series of experiments with the material and explored interests that would occupy a large space in her artistic research, such as the expression of emptiness, the experience of time, being in the world, and the mysteries of transparency.

In 1964, she began the Monotypes series, in which she made drawings on rice paper. The obsessive yet delicate qualities of these works ranged from a single thin line pressed into a page to dense, teeming layers of marks and symbols trapped between acrylic sheets. Schendel was keenly aware of the barriers that language and culture could create between people.

In 1939, because of her Jewish heritage, the Italian government revoked her student visa. By the time she immigrated to Brazil in 1949, she had lived in three countries and spoke six languages. As a European immigrant to Brazil, a student of philosophy, and a bibliophile, Schendel found her affinities to be more often in line with poets, theologians, and scientists than with the artists in the Concrete-art movements that dominated the art world in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, she continued to delve into the larger philosophical questions of life in her work, while simultaneously pushing at the edges of drawing, printing, and sculpture.