When visitors step into the galleries at Tate Modern from 15 July, they will encounter the trace of a body pressed into the earth, outlined by flowers or washed away by water. These are the works of Ana Mendieta, assembled in the first in-depth UK exhibition of her art in more than a decade.
The display gathers over 120 pieces, ranging from the Silueta series made between 1973 and 1980 to newly remastered films, early paintings and late sculptural works. Many have never been shown in the United Kingdom before. Running until 17 January 2027, the exhibition traces how Mendieta used natural materials to create works that outline the body in the landscape and return it, quite literally, to the earth.
Born in Havana in 1948, Mendieta was sent into exile in the United States at the age of 12. She died in 1985. Her practice grew from that rupture yet reached beyond personal biography toward something older. In 1984 she described her approach plainly:
My work is basically in the tradition of a Neolithic art. I’m not interested in the formal qualities of my materials, but their emotional and sensual ones.
The exhibition lets those words guide the viewer. Rather than overlay later ideological readings, it returns attention to the technical mastery and emotional weight of her method. Earth, water, fire and flowers become the vocabulary of temporary interventions, recorded in photographs and film so that the fleeting act survives. Each piece insists on the dignity of the human form meeting the natural world, an impulse that echoes through centuries of Western artistic inquiry rooted in classical motifs of landscape and embodiment.
Connection to older traditions
Mendieta spoke of her art as belonging to the deep current of Neolithic practice. The curators have taken her at her word. The show places her ephemeral earth-body works in conversation with that inheritance, emphasising how she coaxed meaning from raw materials without fetishising their formal properties. The result feels less like a survey of one artist’s career and more like a reminder of what art has long sought: a sensual, emotional bond between person and place.
One sees this most clearly in the Silueta series, where the artist’s outline appears and dissolves in grass, sand or snow. These images carry a quiet insistence. The body is present, then reclaimed by the elements. There is no spectacle, only patient documentation of a gesture that feels both intimate and ancient. The newly remastered films allow today’s audiences to witness the works’ impermanence with greater clarity than before, sharpening the emotional register without altering the original intent.
