Ana Mendieta, Tate Modern review: Strange, singular and strikingly contemporary
Chloe Ashby, Independent
July 2026
In one of her most famous works, the artist Ana Mendieta stands naked on the sandy shores of a stream, pouring a pail of cow’s blood over her body. When she’s done, droplets of deep red spilling from her limbs, she lies down and rolls around, snow angel-style, in a mass of soft white chicken feathers. She ends up covered, from the neck down, to her fingertips and toes; the odd feather has caught in her dark hair, combed off her face. She’s a woman transformed, part-human, part-bird, bizarrely and brilliantly engaged with nature.
The work is called Blood + Feathers (1974) and it features in Tate Modern’s terrific retrospective of the late great Cuban-American multidisciplinary artist in the form of a photograph and two films, alongside 120 works Mendieta made between the mid-1960s and 1985. During her 20-year career, she moved between drawing, sculpture, performance and so-called earth-body works, exploring notions of existence, decay, and renewal. The result: raw, timely works that challenge traditional notions of art as a fixed object and compel us to pay attention to the natural world. […]