Ana Mendieta’s career spanned just fifteen years or so, but her work left a lasting imprint on art to this day. Born in Cuba, she lived in exile in the United States, where she worked alongside the avant-gardes of her day, taking them in directions that were more mindful, complex, and sensitive. She challenged the brutal monumentality of Land Art that dominated the landscape, her own fleeting interventions merging her body with the natural surroundings. Her creative practice was an art of fusion and memory, enshrining gestures, traditions, and ancestral beliefs, and the memory that can only be enacted by disappearance.

The Siluetas series, begun in 1973, can be described as the backbone of her oeuvre. Ana Mendieta took the simple idea of imprinting the mark of a body in the landscape as the starting point for a profusion of heavily symbolic actions. She sought magic beyond concepts and primitive rites beyond political activism. The drawn, etched, hollowed-out, molded body was no longer her own; it called on the deities of Nature to express human experiences of inhabiting the Earth, in all their diversity.

Ana Mendieta was born in Havana in 1948 and died in New York in 1985.

The exhibition Aux commencements / Search for origins is produced in partnership with MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain and MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León.

Image:
Ana Mendieta, « Untitled », 1973, Black and white photograph
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection LLC. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co./ 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich
All rights reserved. Reproduction and any use of the works other than for individual and private consultation is prohibited without the express permission of ProLitteris..