Ana Mendieta at Tate Modern: triumphant show crackles with a ‘sense of pagan magic’
The Week
July 2026
Ana Mendieta “made art from blood, feathers, flowers and sand and in such fresh ways, you’d think these primeval substances were new inventions”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian.
“She literally played with fire, drawing a human figure with gunpowder on the ground or on the trunk of a tree, then setting it alight”; the resulting scorched shadows bring to mind the victims of a nuclear bomb or the dead of Pompeii.