The Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta was 36 when she died on September 8, 1985. She had, in the words of her husband, the Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, “somehow gone out the window” of their 34th-floor Manhattan apartment. Andre was charged with her murder but later acquitted due to insufficient evidence to prove he had pushed her during a drunken row. Deliberately, and rightly, Mendieta’s grievous end is not referenced at all in her triumphant exhibition at Tate Modern — the artist’s largest in the UK. There is just one mention of Andre: in an illustrated book of lithographs made by both artists, titled Pietre Foglie.
Yet it is hard not to view the raw, elemental force of Mendieta’s life and work through the lens of her death. In one video her face looms out of the dark, eyes closed, blood trickling down her forehead. In another piece, Ñañigo Burial (1976), black ritual candles are arranged in the outline of a person, to be lit in accordance with the cycles of the moon for the duration of the show. A section titled Threshold reminds us of Mendieta’s preoccupation with the transference of energy and the cyclical nature of being — birth, life, death, regeneration. The exhibition closes with a video of Mendieta covered head to toe in white feathers, running along a beach as if returning in spirit form.
