Cuban-born performance and multi-media visual artist Ana Mendieta died in 1985 at the age of 36, leaving behind a massive collection of un-exhibited works. Now on view at London’s Hayward Gallery is “Traces,” her first UK retrospective, in which slides of these pieces reveal an untold career.
Born in Cuba in 1948, Mendieta was sent to Iowa by her parents at the age of 13 to escape the communist regime of Fidel Castro. In a subsequent search for identity and belonging, Mendieta turned her attention to the Earth and the female body as her core subjects. Though documented across a wide breadth of medums-photography, film, performance, sculpture-they were, in essence, her only tools. Mendieta developed a visual vernacular of feminine forms through experimentation with materials such as blood, wood and stone. In her famous “Siluetas” (Silhouettes) series, created between 1973 and 1981, she left imprints or outlines in the earth with her body, sometimes adding ritualistic adornments of flowers or fire to those markings.
Mendieta died in New York in 1985 after falling from the 34th-floor apartment she shared with her husband, the sculptor Carl Andre. Some suspect Andre of having thrown Mendieta from the window, though he was acquitted after a three-year trial. In the last room of the exhibition, the duality of the show’s title, which references both the marks made by her body in the earth and the work left behind after her death, is drawn out to a haunting degree. Presented alongside notebooks, postcards, and other archival materials, several white pillars are set up as projection screens for old-fashioned slide projectors showing the un-exhibited works. Each pillar is marked with the year in which the works shown there were made.
(text from art in america)
2087
stormborns
pixelskylines
yousharknotpass
titsay
snowghoul
dailybridgerton
kaledo-art
vaporwave
