Ana Mendieta at Tate Modern – the artist who left her mark on the world
Laura Cumming, The Observer
July 2026
Fiery, prolific, exhilaratingly original and dead at 36: Ana Mendieta’s brutally short life is not easily disentangled from her work. Nor should it be, given that almost everything she made with her hands and eyes, and sometimes her entire naked body, spoke to her existence as a Cuban exile in America. Water, fire and blood, feathers and clay, blossoms and sand, she made sculptures – and made herself into sculptures – that invoked the baked earth and glistening seas of the homeland for which she yearned.
Indeed, Tate Modern’s tremendous survey proves that the only thing that has nothing to do with the art is Mendieta’s death, falling from a 34th-floor window in Greenwich Village after a row with her husband in 1985. The minimalist sculptor Carl Andre was acquitted of her murder. His name is never mentioned in this show, or its catalogue, a convention observed now for more than four decades. But the theory of suicide – rejected as highly implausible by her friends and family – appears just as irrelevant, one now sees, to the great and vivifying nature of her art. […]