‘An influential figure from art history and important for feminism’.

The Hayward Gallery’s current exhibition ‘Ana Mendieta: Traces’ is the UK’s first retrospective of one of the most significant yet under-acknowledged artists of the late 20th century.

It also shows the full breadth of her both provocative and radically inventive body of work.

In addition to films, sculptures, photographs, drawings, personal writings and notebooks, an extensive research room with hundreds of photographic slides provides unique access to works Ana Mendieta  never showed during her lifetime.

Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta was sent to an orphanage in Iowa at the age of 12 and dedicated her entire life to the search for her origins and identity.

Her short career – born in 1948, she died in 1985 – was prolific, beginning with an accomplished and influential body of work created as a graduate student at the University of Iowa.

As a student Mendieta became interested in the interaction between performative rituals and sculpture, and important motifs for her life-long practice emerged during these years, including the use of blood, feathers, fire, earth, and the body.

She also began to draw upon and recreate rituals particularly resonant with Afro-Cuban and Catholic traditions, and goddess archetypes.

Mendieta was part of a generation of innovative artists whose work did not fit the conventions of exhibition making and art collecting.

This exhibition positions Mendieta as an influential figure from art history, reveals the creative mind of the artist, and conveys the legacy of her work as well as its relevance for artists today.

One of the focal points of the exhibition is the re-construction of solo exhibitions from the artist’s lifetime, which includes her main body of works, ‘Siluetas’.

The extensive and fascinating archive material sheds new light on the way the artist worked and documented her own artistic practice.

Featuring super-8 films, photographs, slides, drawings, prints, objects and sculptures, Ana Mendieta: Traces not only follow a chronology, but it also looks at the artist’s entire oeuvre through the lens of her own time, bringing it afresh to the beginning of the 21st century.

The exhibition focuses both on the incredible power of her imagery as well as her critical potential and importance for feminism and land art.

This exhibition runs until 15 December at the Hayward Gallery on London’s South Bank. For further information, click here.