'Through my art, I want to express the immediacy of life and the eternity of nature.' —Ana Mendieta
Born in Cuba in 1948, Ana Mendieta fled Castro's dictatorship when she was 12 years old, leaving her family and home behind, and moved to the United States. Created between 1981 and 1983, the Sandwoman series focuses on the inscription of the artist’s body into the landscape. The works were hand-carved on Miami’s shores where the sea acts as a bridge between the continents; the rounded shapes of the sand sculptures evoke the artist’s body as well as nature’s fauna and flora. The photographic capture of the tracings conjures their impermanence, preserving the organic shape into a fixed form, rendering it almost like a fossil.
A rare, early print by Mendieta, the present work was included in the travelling exhibition Cuba Avant-Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Farber Collection held at over six institutions across North America from 2007 to 2010. Mendieta’s work resides in numerous collections, notably at Tate, London; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.
