At Tate Modern, Ana Mendieta puts body and earth in conversation

In London, Tate Modern’s Ana Mendieta survey avoids a strict chronology and instead groups the work by symbolic places such as The Grove, The School and The Sacred Grounds. That structure makes her practice easier to read as site-specific work: each piece is made in response to a particular place, whether personal, ecological or spiritual.

The opening rooms return to what made Mendieta so distinctive: the Siluetas, often reduced to an imprint, a silhouette, or almost nothing at all, appearing in mud, on a dry riverbank, or sketched in leaves, flowers and branches. For artists, these works are a reminder that drawing can happen without pencil, through contact, absence and the body’s brief meeting with the world.

From trace to terrain

The exhibition then turns to later works, including her final video piece Ochún (1981) and her “rupestrian” sculptures inspired by prehistoric rock art. In these works, female forms are no longer taken from the artist’s own body; they are drawn from rocks, ancient goddesses and prehistory, shifting the focus toward how form can emerge from the material of a place itself.

What the show makes clear is Mendieta’s way of seeing: she does not simply depict a body, but stages a presence that is fragile, embedded in the environment and always close to vanishing. For painters and draughtspeople, the exhibition is compelling because it shows how a work can begin with a simple gesture, a surface or a mark, and still open onto exile, memory and origin.