Until 17 January 2027, Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta’s artistic legacy is on display at Tate Modern in London. The first major UK exhibition of the artist’s work in over a decade was created in collaboration with Mendieta’s estate and approaches her multidisciplinary practice through the lens of her life.
Ana Mendieta’s art is a kind of feminist esotericism that lives somewhere between a romantic feminine divinity and commentary on the patriarchal brutality that seeks to destroy it. Some have read the art as an eerie foreshadowing of the artist’s violent death, but the exhibition, simply titled Ana Mendieta, pushes against this. More than a hundred and twenty works are housed together, thematically arranged to create the vision of the ‘universal bonds’ Mendieta’s art drew upon. Her constant search for return parallels her own story; at the age of twelve, Mendieta and her older sister were sent to the United States by their parents to escape the Cuban Revolution.
Displaced, Mendieta found her connection to the earth rooted less in nationality and more in naturalism, often literally etching traces of her body into the earth for her art. Perhaps the best-known example is her Silueta Series, created from 1973 to 1980, which is on display. The photographs are life-sized, prompting viewers to question their own relationship to the earth, both ephemerally and permanently, as climate change continues to loom over the planet’s future. Additionally, restagings of Mendieta’s works blur the line between past and present, life and death. Though the artist may not be the one recrafting these pieces, viewers are transported back to the world of questions the art opens up: where is the boundary between ephemerality and permanence? Many of the artist’s rarely displayed film works have also been remastered specifically for the exhibition.
Mendieta is a master of transformation. Whether presenting herself as one with the white flowers growing in a crevice of the earth, running across a beach covered in feathers, or painted to match the bark of a tree, she has a vision so distinct that it seems to transcend time. Mendieta has placed herself in the ancient, commented on the contemporary, and still has more to say about the future.
The exhibition Ana Mendieta is on view through 17 January 2027 at Tate Modern, Bankside, London.
