Traces2013

"During her short career, Ana Mendieta (1948-85) created a body of work that was provocative and radically inventive. Using her own body, together with elemental materials - blood, fire, earth and water - she created visceral 'tableaus' and ephemeral 'earth-body' sculptures exploring life, death, rebirth and spiritual transformation. Born in Cuba, but sent to the US as a child, much of her art expresses the pain and rupture of cultural displacement and exile. In Mendieta's work the outline of her body is consumed by gunpowder, fireworks, or advancing waves, and ancient goddess-forms are shaped from sand, carved into rock, or incised into clay or onto leaves. The media are exceptionally diverse, but the images are consistently compelling, mysterious and poetic. Encompassing a wealth of...