Body and Earth: Ana Mendieta Returns to Tate Modern

Some artists work with paint, others with marble. Ana Mendieta worked with mud, blood, fire, gunpowder, flowers and her own body pressed into the ground. On 15 July, Tate Modern opens the first in-depth UK survey of her work in more than a decade, and it is shaping up to be one of the most talked-about exhibitions of the summer. For anyone still forming a picture of what art could be after the 1960s, this is a show worth clearing an afternoon for.

Who was Ana Mendieta?

Mendieta was born in Havana in 1948. In 1961, aged twelve, she and her older sister were sent to the United States under Operation Peter Pan, a scheme that removed thousands of Cuban children from the island in the early years of Fidel Castro’s revolution. She grew up in the American Midwest, far from home, family and language, and that experience of rupture and exile runs like a seam through everything she later made. The sense of a body searching for a place to belong is not a critical flourish laid on afterwards; it is the engine of the work.

She studied and then taught at the University of Iowa before moving to New York, where she became part of a generation of artists tearing up the rulebook. She died in 1985, at just thirty-six, in circumstances that remain painful and contested. In the four decades since, her reputation has only grown, and she is now regarded as one of the most influential figures in performance and land art.

The Silueta Series

If you know one body of Mendieta’s work, it is likely the Silueta series, made largely through the 1970s. The idea is deceptively simple. Mendieta impressed the shape of her own body, or a silhouette standing in for it, into landscapes across Iowa and Mexico, then marked that outline using natural materials. A figure might be scorched into grass, packed with flowers, carved into mud, outlined in candle wax or filled with water that slowly returned to the earth.

These were fleeting gestures, most lasting only hours before wind, tide or decay erased them. What survives are the photographs and films Mendieta made to record them. That tension sits at the heart of her achievement: an art about presence and absence, about a body that is emphatically there and then gone, leaving only a trace. Tate’s exhibition gathers over 150 works, and crucially it includes newly remastered films alongside early paintings and rarely seen late sculptures, so visitors can follow the work as moving image rather than only as still photograph.

Why this show matters now

Two things make this a significant moment. The first is scale. With more than 150 works arranged thematically around symbolic landscapes, this is not a token nod but a serious attempt to map a whole career, including material that has never been shown in the UK before. The second is that Tate has resisted flattening Mendieta into a single famous idea. By setting the Siluetas against her early paintings and her final sculptural pieces, the show argues that she was a restless, evolving artist rather than the author of one arresting motif.

There is also a nice touch of the ephemeral built into the run itself. Ñáñigo Burial, a silhouette made from black ritual candles, will be lit at regular intervals across the exhibition, so the work quite literally changes as the weeks pass. It is a reminder that Mendieta never intended her art to sit still and be admired from a safe distance.

Reading the work with care

Mendieta’s art is powerful, and some of it is difficult. She made pieces that confronted violence against women directly and unflinchingly, and the story of her own death casts a long shadow that visitors will inevitably carry into the galleries. None of this needs to put anyone off. It does mean the show rewards a slower, more attentive kind of looking than a quick lap of the room. Give the films time to unfold, read the wall texts, and let the recurring image of a body returning to the earth do its quiet work.

Making the trip

Ana Mendieta runs at Tate Modern on Bankside from 15 July 2026 to 17 January 2027. As a major ticketed exhibition it is worth booking ahead, particularly for weekends in the opening weeks, and Tate members go free. If you are travelling into London for it, the gallery sits within an easy walk of the reopened Blavatnik Building displays and the river walk along the South Bank, so it slots neatly into a fuller day of looking.

For newer collectors and gallery-goers, Mendieta offers a valuable lesson in what art can be. It need not hang on a wall or sit on a plinth. Sometimes it is a shape pressed into wet ground at dusk, photographed once, and then given back to the landscape that made it.