Experience Ana Mendieta’s Visceral, ‘Neolithic’ Work in a Major Survey
Kate Mothes, Collosal
July 2026
Rarely do artists conceive of work that is prescient and, decades on, more urgent than when it was created. One who has accomplished this is certainly Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), whose interdisciplinary practice merged photography, land art, sculpture, film, and more. And in a large-scale, immersive survey of her work that opens today at Tate Modern, more than 120 pieces revisit the groundbreaking artist’s key series and empathetic exchange with land and nature.
Mendieta is best known for her Silueta Series, in which she impressed the shape of the human body in water, mud, rock, and forests. These sometimes consisted of outlines “drawn” onto surfaces, such as a gunpowder tribute on a fallen tree, which exists eternally half-ablaze in a photograph. Others are impressed directly into the earth, as if a person had been lying there for millennia as the desert or stone formed around her. […]