After spending the war in Sarajevo, she returned to Italy, with her first husband Josep Hargesheimer, and worked for the International Refugee Organisation in Rome.

In São Paulo, an immigrant city that was industrial and undergoing rapid growth, Schendel found a circle of emigre intellectuals from different disciplines with whom she could discuss ideas about aesthetics and philosophy; this included the Czech-born philosopher Vilem Flusser, the physicist Mário Schenberg and the psychoanalyst Theon Spanudis among others.

The graphic output in Schendel’s paintings explore the relations between language and art, and the inquiry into that relationship reveals itself in the totality of her work.

[7] Schendel’s paintings from the mid-1950s depict shallow surfaces, simplified figuration, and muted tones, and the textures and materials stand out more than the values of the color.

[7] In the early 1960s, the corporeal component of Schendel’s paintings began to change as she moved toward a more imprecise and all-embracing involvement with space.

However, later in her career lines lost association with the movement of her hand and gained the generality of concepts as she began to place them in ambiguous situations.

One important group of monotypes was inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–1956), an early piece of electronic music that employed vocals drawn from the biblical Book of Daniel.

After using rice paper in Monotypes and discovering the quality of the material, Schendel began to use it as an autonomous medium itself in her works Droguinhas and Trenzinho.

[8] By 1966 Schendel put a hold on painting to create sculptures made from rice paper rolled up into strings that were woven into knots.

In works such as Droguinhas, Trenzinhos, and Still Waves of Probability, despite the overall repetition and accumulation, Schendel explores language as action, faltering to absolute resistance.

However, penetrable works by Schendel, among others, displace density, transforming it and using it to transcend purely sensory perception and therefore suggesting new dimensions according to Perez-Oramas.

[7] Penetrable works by Schendel at the end of the 1960s contributed heavily to the conversion of abstract form into a specific place that began demanding participation from the viewer.

[7] Schendel’s Perfurados creates constellations, clusters, and spiderwebs of light, walls, or undersurfaces shining through their pinpricked surfaces.

Although these works are small scale they evoke cosmic dimensions and ethereal distances, but at the same time call attention to the materials in which they are made.

[8] By the early 1970s, the essential character of Schendel’s work had emerged with an aesthetic that didn’t attempt any classification or justification which lead to the most original expressions of contemporary art.

[7] In one of Schendel’s last series, Monochromatics (1986–87,) she coated wooden surfaces with gently modulated plaster and painted in white and black tempera.

In 1954, she met Knut Schendel, a German emigre and owner of an important bookshop, Canuto, which was a hub for São Paulo's intellectuals.