Ana Mendieta. She Got Love

Ana Mendieta. She got love gathers a considerable number of works by the Cuban-American artist: more than 130 works created between 1972 and 1985, chosen from among the most significant works in the prolific production that the artist created during her brief life. The volume puts on view her extremely personal alphabet – visionary and material, magical and poetic, political and progressive. This is an effort to reinterpret Mendieta as a pioneer of performance, video, Body Art, photography, Land Art and sculpture in the twentieth century. One of Mendieta’s unique contributions is the synthesis of these forms in a fresh visual language that influenced a generation of young artists.

Constructing her own, extremely personal path without limiting herself to following in the footsteps of Land Art, Body Art or performance art and their protagonists, from Robert Smithson to Vito Acconci, from Joan Jonas to Rebecca Horn, from Marina Abramovic to Bruce Nauman. In just a short time – her art career lasted only thirteen years – she experimented with various media: performance, video, photography, drawing and sculpture, always putting herself into the work and looking for answers, not only in tradition but also in everything that ties human roots to spirituality.

Today she is considered a cornerstone of a historical period and it is also thanks to her work’s eclectic nature that many women artists, coming from different parts of the globe and from later generations, have in some way looked at her work.

The exhibition attempts to convey the rhythm of Mendieta’s work, presenting the succession of her experimentations in a sequence that is thematic rather than strictly chronological. Thus what comes across is a design where elements intersect, take leave of one another and reappear over time.