One Fine Show: “Ana Mendieta” at Tate Modern in London
Observer · · g2643743
Sent from Havana to live in the United States at 12, Mendieta abandoned painting in graduate school for performance, film and a land-based practice inspired in part by her personal history. This sweeping survey brings that transformation into focus.
There was a moment in the 20th Century when it seemed possible that art was going to become less of a product. Andy Warhol had proven that painting needed to become something different and a host of other artists put effort into making art that was more conceptual, more ethereal. One of the more prominent was Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), though she still left something behind to buy. How surprising it was to wander the halls of Christie’s in 2024 to see her work there from the Rosa de la Cruz Collection , how surprising to read the headline “Ana Mendieta… break[s] auction record[s] at Christie’s,” even if the record remained in the six figures.
But it’s hard to argue that she hasn’t been having a moment. The artist is the subject of “Ana Mendieta” at Tate Modern, the first major United Kingdom exhibition of her work in more than a decade. Organized with the artist’s estate and curated by Valentine Umansky and Michael Wellen, the show gathers more than 120 works arranged by symbolic location—the cave, the grove, the river, the sacred grounds—rather than by chronology. Newly remastered films premiere alongside rarely seen early paintings. Several of those more ephemeral pieces are restaged for the run, like the sand-and-binder floor sculptures from her Rome years. “My work is basically in the tradition of Neolithic art,” she said in 1984. Sent from Havana to the United States at 12 under Operation Peter Pan, she may not have been trying to reinvent art history in the way that she did. She was interested mainly in the emotional and sensual qualities of her materials.
“ Ana Mendieta “ Artist: Ana Mendieta Venue: Tate Modern Address: Bankside, London SE1 9TG Through: January 17, 2027
Said sensuality is on display in Blood + Feathers (1974), a three-minute Super 8 film in which the artist dumps a green wine bottle full of cow’s blood all over her naked body before dropping into a pile of chicken feathers. Apparently she’d tried this once before with turkey feathers that didn’t stick. This time they do, and after she rises she stares into the camera and says, “more like a peacock than a chicken.” The body is both celebrated and denigrated in this action, the strangeness both a way into Afro-Cuban spirituality and the main barrier to it.
There are shades of the Afro-Cuban religions in Ñañigo Burial (1976), too, ñañigo being the title of a shamanistic dancer in an all-male secret society. In it a female silhouette is created on the gallery floor with 47 black candles of the kind sold in bodegas. Remade for Tate Modern, one has to remark at its prescience. It predates Urs Fischer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and all kinds of contemporary gender play.
Painting could never have held her. De película (c. 1969) is an oil on canvas work made the year she enrolled in the University of Iowa’s MA painting program, where the professors told her she couldn’t paint. The title is the Spanish expression for something cinematic, usually ironic, and it depicts a woman in profile with Gorgon eyes, sculpted curls and cheeks that blush yellow. She’s wedged inside the frame as though she’s been shut in a closet. The palette seems heavily influenced by dirt. She all but abandoned the medium before finishing the degree, though she did complete her MA in painting in 1972 before moving to the Intermedia program, where she earned an MFA in 1977. Once when assigned a partner’s portrait, she submitted photographs in which she wore a classmate’s beard. She later told a lecture hall that her paintings had not been “real enough.”