One Fine Show: “Ana Mendieta” at Tate Modern in London
Dan Duray, The Observer
October 2026
[…] It’s hard to argue that (Ana Mendieta) hasn’t been having a moment. The artist is the subject of “Ana Mendieta” at Tate Modern, the first major United Kingdom exhibition of her work in more than a decade. Organised with the artist’s estate and curated by Valentine Umansky and Michael Wellen, the show gathers more than 120 works arranged by symbolic location—the cave, the grove, the river, the sacred grounds—rather than by chronology. Newly remastered films premiere alongside rarely seen early paintings. Several of those more ephemeral pieces are restaged for the run, like the sand-and-binder floor sculptures from her Rome years. “My work is basically in the tradition of Neolithic art,” she said in 1984. Sent from Havana to the United States at 12 under Operation Peter Pan, she may not have been trying to reinvent art history in the way that she did. She was interested mainly in the emotional and sensual qualities of her materials […]