Ana Mendieta’s Lasting Art of Disappearance

Tate Modern is presenting the first major UK exhibition of Ana Mendieta in more than a decade. Spanning nearly the entire arc of her brief career, the exhibition brings together her early experiments with the body, the celebrated Silueta series, and her later works.

The exhibition is organized around the themes and places that were central to Mendieta’s practice. More than 120 works are on view, including photographs, films, drawings, sculptures, and installations. Several films were specially restored for the exhibition, while a number of ephemeral works have been recreated within the museum itself. 

Mendieta’s biography is essential to understanding the recurring themes of her work. Born in Havana in 1948, she was sent from Cuba to the United States with her sister at the age of twelve, leaving her parents and brother behind. The experience of migration, the loss of home, and the rupture of her connection to her native culture shaped the questions she would return to throughout her life: where we belong, what connects us to the land, and whether that connection can be restored once it has been forcibly broken.

Ana Mendieta, Bird Run 1974

 Cuba remained a very real point of connection for her. In the 1981 film Ochún, a figure made of sand appears on the shore of Key Biscayne, Florida, while the water becomes a space linking the United States and Cuba. That same year, Mendieta created Esculturas Rupestres, figures carved directly into limestone rock and connected at once to her own Siluetas, the culture of the Indigenous Taíno people, and Afro-Cuban traditions. She was searching for a connection to the history of a place, to something that had existed long before her own presence there.

Behind the apparent simplicity of the series lies a much larger set of questions about the human attempt to inscribe oneself into a space to which one did not originally belong. In her early work, Mendieta used her own body extensively. She altered it, distorted her face, experimented with makeup, wigs, and glass, and photographed and filmed herself. Over time, her approach changed: the physical body began to disappear, leaving only its trace, often as an outline in the earth. To me, the absence of the body in these works speaks of it far more powerfully than its physical presence.

The best-known example is the Silueta Series, begun during a trip to Mexico in 1973. Mendieta burned, carved, and shaped the outline of the human body into landscapes across the Americas and Europe, using earth, water, fire, flowers, and plants. These works were never intended to endure. They were meant to change with nature and eventually disappear. As a result, most of them now exist for us only through photographic and film documentation, creating a paradox: the artist makes a work destined to vanish while simultaneously recording its disappearance.

Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series 1977

Ana Mendieta, Untitled Silueta Series, 1976.

Mendieta brought together the ancient and the contemporary in a remarkable way. She studied archaeology, drew on Neolithic art and ancient cultures, yet at the same time was among the artists working most freely with media that were still relatively new in her era. For her, film was never simply a means of documenting an action. She scratched directly into film, drew on it, and experimented with the physical material of the image itself.

The Tate Modern exhibition also makes clear that Mendieta’s relationship to place cannot be reduced to an abstract idea of land or nature. We encounter another side of the artist, one that can easily be overshadowed by her best-known works. After moving to New York in 1978, she became actively involved in the city’s art scene and was connected to the feminist movement. She taught, worked with students, and participated in a vibrant experimental environment.

In 1983, Mendieta received the Prix de Rome and moved to the American Academy in Rome. After years of working directly in the landscape, she increasingly began making works in the studio. More durable materials and forms entered her practice. At Tate, we see drawings on leaves and bark paper, as well as La Jungla (Totem Grove) from 1985, a group of wooden sculptures whose surfaces bear figures burned into them with gunpowder.

This marked an important moment in her work, as she began to explore forms that could last over time. In September 1985, Ana Mendieta died in New York at the age of 36 after falling from the window of an apartment where she was with her husband, the prominent American sculptor Carl Andre. Andre was charged with murder and later acquitted at trial. The exact circumstances of Mendieta’s death have never been conclusively established, and the case has remained a subject of controversy and a painful chapter in the history of contemporary art.

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Guanaroca [First Woman]), 1981/1994

It is therefore difficult to completely separate the circumstances of her death from the experience of seeing the exhibition. At the same time, I think it is important not to turn Mendieta’s art into a premonition of her own death, or to read her work retrospectively only through the tragedy of its ending. Importantly, many of her works speak not so much about disappearance as about return and the restoration of connection. Still, the knowledge of how early her life ended inevitably stays with us as we look at these works today.

It is striking how differently many artistic practices of the 1970s read today. Mendieta is usually discussed in relation to feminist art, body art, land art, and performance. All of these remain essential to understanding the period in which she worked. But today, her work is also inevitably seen through the experience of migration, movement between countries and cultures, the loss of home, and the search for belonging. The figure of a person trying to rebuild a connection to place after losing a home, which appears again and again in Mendieta’s work, is perhaps one of the most resonant images of our time. And in her work, that sense of rootedness is almost never permanent: the earth dries, water flows, fire goes out, and plants continue to grow. A significant part of the work itself has long ceased to exist physically. What remains is the document recording that it once happened.

Art built around disappearance has proved capable of outliving its maker, and her name is not confined to the art history of the 1970s. The questions she was asking then have only become more urgent in the decades since.

Ana Mendieta
July 14, 2026 – January 17, 2027
Tate Modern, London