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Lot Essay
In 1983, Ana Mendieta was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome in sculpture, an award that came with a one-year residency at the American Academy in Rome. This would be the first time Mendieta had her own studio; she moved in September. Once resident in the Eternal City, Mendieta felt free for the first time from the burden of being Cuban in the United States. Relatively quickly, she developed a strong affinity for Italy, exploring the ruins around Rome, visiting Pompeii, and befriending artists and local critics.
That autumn, Mendieta started a new cycle of works using sand that she imported, soil taken from the grounds of the Academy, and a binder. From this combination, she created flat floor sculptures based upon the scale of her body of which Untitled (Serie mujer de arena) is a superlative example. It was during these years that the so-called ‘labyrinthine’ figure first emerged in Mendieta’s practice, characterized by the wavy patterned lines as seen in the present work. In Untitled (Serie mujer de arena) channels in the sand both produce and are produced wherein the self—as represented by the outline of the body—and the earth are literally fused, with both coming to constitute the other.
In her brief but incandescent career, Mendieta merged earth and body across a variety of media, from film and photography to performance and drawing. Her practice looked to both contemporary positions—multiculturalism, the role of women—and historical frameworks that transcended time and geography. Born in Cuba, Mendieta and her sister were sent to the United States in 1961 as part of Operation Pedro Pan. After complicated years adjusting to a new home, she eventually enrolled in the University of Iowa’s Intermedia program, established by Hans Breder who became her mentor. The program privileged performance and sought to tear down the divisions between art and life. It was there that Mendieta became committed to her own burgeoning artistic practice.
Many of the themes that would endure in Mendieta’s art initially emerged during these years, specifically ideas around the ‘universal female’, violence, and the relationship between body and nature as embodied by her Siluetas, or silhouettes. A touchstone for nearly all of Mendieta’s later output, the Siluetas were ephemeral, site-specific works she created in Iowa and Mexico which combined her body (or its imprint in the earth) and various organic materials; such legacies are evident in Untitled (Serie mujer de arena).
While her work was tied to the terrestrial, she consumed voraciously everything and anything related to the spiritual. To wit, Mendieta filled her journals with images as varied as Stonehenge, Hadrian’s Villa, and the Valley of the Kings, studied Santéria, and read up on ancient myths. As her contemporary, the artist Carolee Schnneeman said, “Ana became very uncomfortable when someone tried to confine her to a whole set of conditions either of spirit of body or feminist principles because she was more powerfully integrated” (C. Schneeman, quoted in O. Viso, “The Memory of History”, in Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985, exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Graden, Washington D.C., p. 67).
While land art proliferated during this period—exemplified by artists such as Robert Smithson and James Turrell—Mendieta refuted this identification. “My work is basically in the tradition of a Neolithic artist,” Mendieta allowed. “It has very little to do with most earth art. I’m not interested in the formal qualities of my materials, but their emotional and sensual ones” (A. Mendieta, quoted in Viso, Unseen Mendieta: The Unpublished Works of Ana Mendieta, New York, 2008, p. 232). Such impulses continued to define her work, which expresses an almost impossible sensuality. The sand sculptures she initiated in Rome are likewise tactile; they beg to be touched.
In an interview conducted in 1984, Mendieta told the artist Linda Montano that her art was about Eros and the relationship between life and death. Certainly, with its horizontality and use of soil, it is not difficult to project ideas around mortality onto Untitled (Serie mujer de arena). The inevitable associations with decomposition and reassimilation into the earth further this reading. Yet far from morbid or gloomy, Mendieta’s art was profoundly generative. She sought always connection across time and space. “Art,” Mendieta noted, “must have begun as nature itself, in a dialectical relationship between humans the natural world form which we cannot be separated” (A. Mendieta, quoted in B. Clearwater, “Introduction: The Ruestrian Sculpturers Photo Etchings”, in B. Clearwater, Ana Mendieta: A Book of Works, Miami, 1993, p. 11).
That autumn, Mendieta started a new cycle of works using sand that she imported, soil taken from the grounds of the Academy, and a binder. From this combination, she created flat floor sculptures based upon the scale of her body of which Untitled (Serie mujer de arena) is a superlative example. It was during these years that the so-called ‘labyrinthine’ figure first emerged in Mendieta’s practice, characterized by the wavy patterned lines as seen in the present work. In Untitled (Serie mujer de arena) channels in the sand both produce and are produced wherein the self—as represented by the outline of the body—and the earth are literally fused, with both coming to constitute the other.
In her brief but incandescent career, Mendieta merged earth and body across a variety of media, from film and photography to performance and drawing. Her practice looked to both contemporary positions—multiculturalism, the role of women—and historical frameworks that transcended time and geography. Born in Cuba, Mendieta and her sister were sent to the United States in 1961 as part of Operation Pedro Pan. After complicated years adjusting to a new home, she eventually enrolled in the University of Iowa’s Intermedia program, established by Hans Breder who became her mentor. The program privileged performance and sought to tear down the divisions between art and life. It was there that Mendieta became committed to her own burgeoning artistic practice.
Many of the themes that would endure in Mendieta’s art initially emerged during these years, specifically ideas around the ‘universal female’, violence, and the relationship between body and nature as embodied by her Siluetas, or silhouettes. A touchstone for nearly all of Mendieta’s later output, the Siluetas were ephemeral, site-specific works she created in Iowa and Mexico which combined her body (or its imprint in the earth) and various organic materials; such legacies are evident in Untitled (Serie mujer de arena).
While her work was tied to the terrestrial, she consumed voraciously everything and anything related to the spiritual. To wit, Mendieta filled her journals with images as varied as Stonehenge, Hadrian’s Villa, and the Valley of the Kings, studied Santéria, and read up on ancient myths. As her contemporary, the artist Carolee Schnneeman said, “Ana became very uncomfortable when someone tried to confine her to a whole set of conditions either of spirit of body or feminist principles because she was more powerfully integrated” (C. Schneeman, quoted in O. Viso, “The Memory of History”, in Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985, exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Graden, Washington D.C., p. 67).
While land art proliferated during this period—exemplified by artists such as Robert Smithson and James Turrell—Mendieta refuted this identification. “My work is basically in the tradition of a Neolithic artist,” Mendieta allowed. “It has very little to do with most earth art. I’m not interested in the formal qualities of my materials, but their emotional and sensual ones” (A. Mendieta, quoted in Viso, Unseen Mendieta: The Unpublished Works of Ana Mendieta, New York, 2008, p. 232). Such impulses continued to define her work, which expresses an almost impossible sensuality. The sand sculptures she initiated in Rome are likewise tactile; they beg to be touched.
In an interview conducted in 1984, Mendieta told the artist Linda Montano that her art was about Eros and the relationship between life and death. Certainly, with its horizontality and use of soil, it is not difficult to project ideas around mortality onto Untitled (Serie mujer de arena). The inevitable associations with decomposition and reassimilation into the earth further this reading. Yet far from morbid or gloomy, Mendieta’s art was profoundly generative. She sought always connection across time and space. “Art,” Mendieta noted, “must have begun as nature itself, in a dialectical relationship between humans the natural world form which we cannot be separated” (A. Mendieta, quoted in B. Clearwater, “Introduction: The Ruestrian Sculpturers Photo Etchings”, in B. Clearwater, Ana Mendieta: A Book of Works, Miami, 1993, p. 11).