Rarely do artists conceive of work that is prescient and, decades on, more urgent than when it was created. One who has accomplished this is certainly Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), whose interdisciplinary practice merged photography, land art, sculpture, film, and more. And in a large-scale, immersive survey of her work that opens today at Tate Modern, more than 120 pieces revisit the groundbreaking artist’s key series and empathetic exchange with land and nature.
Mendieta is best known for her Silueta Series, in which she impressed the shape of the human body in water, mud, rock, and forests. These sometimes consisted of outlines “drawn” onto surfaces, such as a gunpowder tribute on a fallen tree, which exists eternally half-ablaze in a photograph. Others are impressed directly into the earth, as if a person had been lying there for millennia as the desert or stone formed around her.
In what she described as “earth-body” works, Mendieta explored vital relationships between humans and nature, absence and presence, experience and temporality, and place and identity. She often turned the lens on herself, building compositions that plumb the tensions between beauty, ruggedness, vulnerability, and strength. Her practice can easily be viewed through the lens of ecofeminism, a movement that emerged around the same time Mendieta was working, but it is also profoundly personal.
At 12 years old, Mendieta was separated from her parents and brother, who remained in her home country of Cuba, when she and her sister were exiled to the U.S. following the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Throughout her life and brief career, she grappled with themes of displacement and disconnection. “My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe,” Mendieta said. “It is a return to the maternal source.”
There is also humor in her approach to self-representation, such as her early series of self-portraits in which she documented her wet hair in wild, sculptural forms or produced a sequential series of images in which an arrangement of flowers gradually conceals her face. Within a few years, the work adopted a more solemn, enigmatic tone, characterized by voids, organic forms, gesture, and ephemerality.
Mendieta also drew on her fascination with archaeology to create multimedia works that delved into the relationship between humans and the land. “My work is basically in the tradition of a Neolithic art,” she said in 1984. “I’m not interested in the formal qualities of my materials, but their emotional and sensual ones.”
The artist’s interest in the ancient past ultimately lends a timelessness to themes that resonate through her personal narrative but also, incidentally, the ills of the present. One might think of our screen-fueled social discord and the accelerating climate crisis, both also defined by a sense of alienation and disjointedness. Though Mendieta couldn’t have conceived of these things as we experience them today, she nevertheless tapped into a kind of visceral biophilia that’s more critical than ever. The exhibition at Tate highlights not only the artist’s the desire to connect with nature but also casts a light on how far removed from it most of us have become.
Ana Mendieta continues through January 17, 2027, in London. Plan your visit on Tate’s website.
