Ana Mendieta “made art from blood, feathers, flowers and sand and in such fresh ways, you’d think these primeval substances were new inventions”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian.
“She literally played with fire, drawing a human figure with gunpowder on the ground or on the trunk of a tree, then setting it alight”; the resulting scorched shadows bring to mind the victims of a nuclear bomb or the dead of Pompeii.
Mendieta was born in Cuba in 1948, and when the revolution came, she was sent to the US, where she always felt like an outsider. “Home, for her, was the past”, and she made it her mission to “excavate the very origins of art and mythology”.
Mendieta worked in many disciplines: painting, film, photography, performance, sculpture. She used “organic matter”: a human silhouette made of flowers; a hand imprint in a muddy wasteland; a fertility goddess figure carved in limestone. Her art is “irresistible”, and creates “a personal mythology … as weirdly coherent as William Blake’s”.
If she had lived, Mendieta would have been “at the forefront of the art of this century”. But in 1985, aged only 36, she died – falling from the balcony of her 34th-floor apartment in New York, in suspicious circumstances. The artist Carl Andre, her husband, was tried for murder, and acquitted.
The show is packed with “raw, timely works”, said Chloë Ashby in The Independent. They “compel us to pay attention to the natural world”. Scattered throughout are pieces from her Silueta Series, begun in 1973. Many of these are photographs, documenting the artist’s practice of stamping human silhouettes into mud and observing as “weeds and brambles” or other growths rendered them invisible.
Elsewhere, a famous video sees the artist next to a stream, “pouring a pail of cow’s blood over her body”. Blood spilling from her limbs, she lies down in “a mass of soft white chicken feathers”. When she stands, she is “a woman transformed, part-human, part-bird, bizarrely and brilliantly engaged with nature”.
Many of Mendieta’s concerns – “feminism, environmentalism, anti-colonialism” – resonate today, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Yet this is not a show about “identity politics”. It is, rather, “filled with a rich visual poetry” that is “both forceful and fragile”.
One photograph from the Silueta Series, for instance, sees a human outline half buried on a hillside, “arms clamped by its sides in the manner of an Egyptian mummy”. Another sees Mendieta herself deep in a rocky cavity, as if consumed by the wildflowers sprouting around her.
The exhibition doesn’t make a martyr of her: Andre is barely mentioned, and this is for the best. Staged with “flair” and “sensitivity”, it crackles with “a sense of pagan magic” – and it’s by far the best show Tate Modern has mounted this summer.
Tate Modern, London SE1. Until 17 January