ANA MENDIETA

Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, the artist’s niece and Associate Administrator of the Estate of Ana Mendieta, will be present for the opening reception at 5pm.

Following the completion of Mendieta’s well-known Silueta Series (1973–1980), the artist’s works became increasingly greater in scale and sculptural. In 1980, she began using a medium format camera, enabling her photographs to be printed on a large scale. To emphasize the geometry and three-dimensionality of her forms, Mendieta also began to favor black-and-white photography over colour. Mendieta was the first exile to be officially recognised by the Cuban Ministry of Culture to create works of art in Cuba, and she completed one of the most important cycle of works, Rupestrian Sculptures, in the hills of Jaruco Park. Working within nature and in remote locations, Mendieta took inspiration from indigenous Cuban culture and pre-Columbian myths to inscribe archetypal female forms within the landscape. She carved directly into limestone and painted silhouettes in black, leaving her mark in a place that was home and naming the individual sculptures after Taíno deities. Several black-and-white Rupestrian Sculptures photographs will be on view, in which Mendieta carved abstracted figures into rock formations. Two newly digitised films–Untitled, made in Varadero and Untitled, made in Guanabo–which Mendieta filmed in Cuba will be shown for the first time.

The exhibition also features works made in Miami, symbolically and physically the closest geographic point to Cuba. Finding affinity to Miami’s shores, she often visited and created a number of works in the landscape, notably, the Sandwoman (1983) series. A rare recreation of the original installation, which anticipated her subsequent sculptures made from earth and wood, as well as several Sandwoman photographs. Ochún (1981), a photograph of a work that Mendieta also documented on video, was titled after the patron saint of Cuba and Afro-Cuban deity who possesses the power to create unity. Two curved ridges of sand symbolise the United States and Cuba, unified by the same water, which then flows between them. Displacement and unity, two abiding themes for Mendieta, are clearly present throughout this body of work and the exhibition.

Mendieta was born in Havana in 1948 and, following the Cuban Revolution, was exiled to the United States in 1961. She lived and worked in Iowa, Mexico and New York City. Mendieta died in New York City in 1985. Galerie Lelong & Co. has been the exclusive representative of the Estate of Ana Mendieta since 1991. The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, in collaboration with the gallery, recently catalogued and digitised the entirety of Mendieta’s moving image works, discovering that the artist remarkably made more than 100 in the ten-year period in which she worked in the medium. The groundbreaking exhibition of her moving image works, Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta, was co-curated by Lynn Lukkas and Howard Oransky and produced by the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota in 2016. It has travelled to several institutions worldwide and will open at Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, for the last time this fall, from 16 October 2018–27 January 2019. Jeu de Paume will also host a film screening about and discussion with Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, Howard Oransky, and Elvan Zabunyan on October 16, 7–9pm. The evening will feature two Super 8 films that Ana Mendieta made in Cuba and a short documentary made by the artist’s niece. The documentary, Whispering Cave, follows the filmmaker as she searches for her aunt’s remaining sculptures in Jaruco.