Ana Mendieta

Two newly digitized and restored films and a series of late drawings by Ana Mendieta will be exhibited at Galerie Lelong. Ana Mendieta Film Works and Drawings 1974-1985 will open to the public on Friday, May 21, 2004 from 6 to 8 P.M.

Galerie Lelong has represented the Estate of Ana Mendieta since 1991; this will be the gallery’s sixth exhibition of the artist. It will be concurrent with the retrospective exhibition organized by the Hirshhorn Museum, opening July 1st at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Ana Mendieta’s contributions to early performance art through photography and her series of ephemeral works in the landscape, the silueta series, are well known. However, the role of film in these performances and actions is less recognized, due, in part, to the original media’s fragility. Through the recent restoration of a group of these films, and an increasing interest in works from the Seventies’, the films’ importance in Mendieta’s oeuvre is more evident.

Working with a domestic Super-8 film camera, Mendieta experimented with film in her performance actions from 1973 through 1981. All but one of the almost eighty film works are silent, underscoring Mendieta’s use of film as mute witness. The films capture Mendieta’s concentration on the fugitive and the temporal, as well as make tangible and visible her ritual performances and actions, most of which were done in private.

Some of Mendieta’s works only exist in film, two of which are exhibited here. In Creek #1, 1974, filmed in Mexico, Mendieta lay face down in a creek, washed by running water, symbolically cleansed and reborn. Exhibiting remarkable discipline, she stays completely still, almost a sculpture in herself, merging with the earth, the rise and fall of her back indicating breath. It is one of the painterliest of her film works, uniting drawing with a temporal action. The other film on view, Keane College Volcano 1980, is one of the artist’s last films, demonstrating Mendieta’s interest in transformation and temporality, encapsulated in real time.

In 1983 Mendieta received a Prix de Rome. For the first time she had an indoor studio in which to work for an extended period of time. There she experimented with various ways of “bringing the nature inside”. One of the results of her investigation is the series of drawings on view in the gallery. Like her earlier performance works, Mendieta experiments with various media in drawing and repetition; incising, tracing, marking the paper with wash, ink, pencil and rubbings. Certain forms, such as the Madre selva, the leaf woman and hieratic female figures, recur, and are explored for their plastic and symbolic meaning.

Ana Mendieta Film Works and Drawings continues through July 30, 2004. Ana Mendieta Earth Body will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from July 1 to September 19, 2004; and at the Hirshhorn Museum from October 14, 2004 to January 5, 2005.

Pressetext

Ana Mendieta - Film Works and Drawings 1974 - 1985