ANA MENDIETA: BACK TO THE SOURCE

MARIAN GOODMAN Gallery is delighted to announce Back to the Source , our inaugural exhibition of the work of Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) which will be on view in our Tribeca space from 7 November 2025 - 17 January 2026.

November 07, 2025 – January 17, 2026

Back to the Source presents seminal works from 1972-1985, a prolific period of Mendieta’s work, spanning stages of time spent in Iowa, Mexico, and Cuba, including ten digitally remastered films, photographic works, newly available photographic prints and drawings, and ephemeral sculpture.

Ana Mendieta was a pioneer and innovator whose oeuvre spanned painting, drawing, photography, film/video, sculpture, and site-specific works. Her singular interventions in the landscape embraced nature and disrupted societal conventions. Exiled from her homeland of Cuba where she was born in 1948, Mendieta spent her childhood and formative years in Iowa, in the 1960s. She later studied art at the University of Iowa, first as a painter, then later in performative art, a move which would ultimately change her approach as an artist. Her body of work testifies to a passionate engagement with themes of exile and displacement, reconnecting with the earth, and the search for belonging and origin, through power, magic and the universal.

Creating a rich and diverse body of work that included ephemeral sculptures, Mendieta, in her film and photographic works, captures time and process through direct actions which transport her beyond conventional materials to the realm of the intangible and impermanent, using nature as a collaborator. With her body as material, and driven by nature’s symbolic meaning, she sought to integrate power, magic and knowledge into her work, using natural materials as well as the four elements –earth, air, fire, and water. Feathers, flowers, branches, moss, fireworks and gunpowder were easily accessible and were often part of ritual practices to return her to the land and connect her to the universal. These obsessive acts of reasserting my ties with the earth is really a manifestation of my thirst for being. In essence my works are the reactivation of primeval beliefs. The photographs become the afterimage of primordial remembrances at work within the human psyche. – Mendieta, Proposal for Rome Prize Fellowship, 1983.

Using the earth as a sculptural medium – which she molded, impressed, and burned – Mendieta conveyed notions of existence, resurgence and renewal through site-inclusive works that were exquisitely ethereal and transitory. Contemplative and existential meditations on mortality and the natural world, these works were part of living processes.

An interest in themes of transformation – birth, life, death, regeneration – is evident throughout her oeuvre, and can be seen in Ñañigo Burial, 1976, installed in the first floor gallery. Comprised of black candles which originally outlined the contours of the artist’s body, its title points to the influence of the Abakuá society of Cuba, also known as Ñañiguismo, which offers spiritual protection to its members. Drawn to this and Afro Cuban Santeria traditions, which blend the Yoruba religion of West Africa, Roman Catholicism, and Spiritism, Mendieta sought magic and the divine to regenerate life within her work and through nature.