Gender and art

Ana Mendieta, Facial Hair Transplant, 1972.

"The Museum der Moderne Salzburg opened an extensive retrospective of the work of Ana Mendieta, one of our era’s most important and influential artists. Mendieta was born to a politically active family in Havana, Cuba in 1948. In the wake of the Cuban revolution, when she was only twelve years old, her parents sent her together with her sister to the United States. In 1985, at just thirty-six years old, she died under tragic circumstance in New York. During her short yet prolific career, she developed a unique visual language that is mesmerizing in its intimacy, and equally challenging. Her pioneering work has been acknowledged by large retrospectives in the United States and Europe, and is represented in the collections of major museums."

Ana Mendieta - Traces

Museum der Moderne, Salzburg

29.3.2014 - 6.7.2014

http://www.museumdermoderne.at/en/exhibitions/current/details/mdm/ana-mendieta/

"[...] Cuban-born and American-raised, Mendieta described her work as “earth-body” art. From 1971, when she had her first solo show while an MA student at the University of Iowa, until her death, she created a diverse collection of work that included silhouettes of her body created in mud, earth, rocks, wild flowers and leaves, performance pieces that evoked the folk and occult traditions of her native Cuba as well as her beloved Mexico and subversive self-portraits that played with notions of beauty, belonging and gender. [...]"

Image : Imagen de Yagul, 1973, performance Ana Mendieta

"The mystery of how Ana Mendieta fell 34 floors from the window of her New York apartment has echoes in the work she left behind, writes Sean O'Hagan.

[...] Cuban-born and American-raised, Mendieta described her work as "earth-body" art. From 1971, when she had her first solo show while an MA student at the University of Iowa, until her death, she created a diverse collection of work that included silhouettes of her body created in mud, earth, rocks, wild flowers and leaves, performance pieces that evoked the folk and occult traditions of her native Cuba as well as her beloved Mexico and subversive self-portraits that played with notions of beauty, belonging and gender. In her performance pieces, where she sometimes used blood "as a very, powerful magical thing", she evoked the power of female sexuality as well as the horror of male sexual violence. In her photographic self-portraits, she pressed her face against glass to distort her features or pictured herself dripping in blood or disguised as a man with glued-on facial hair..."

Ana Mendieta: Traces is at the Hayward gallery, London

24 September - 15 December 2013

http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/festivals-series/ana-mendieta

"Ana Mendieta is among the most important and influential artists of our era. She was born in 1948 in Cuba, and was sent by her parents at the age of twelve, together with her sister, to be raised in the United States. She died in New York in 1985, at the age of thirty-six. Her pioneering work has been acknowledged by large retrospectives in the United States and Europe, and is represented in the collections of major museums. Long overdue in the German-speaking area, especially in Austria, are a comprehensive exhibition and German monograph on Ana Mendieta. The exhibition presents a comprehensive overview, with roughly 150 central works in diverse media ranging from photography, film, and sculpture through to drawing. A large section of the show will present the artist’s archive: slides and photographs, notebooks and postcards will be specially prepared for the exhibition."

Two startlingly different retrospectives show Sarah Lucas and Ana Mendieta socking it to the male-dominated art world.

Officially, there is no such thing as Women’s Art Month. Officially, the fact  that so many powerful women artists are concurrently on show in our  galleries is merely a coincidence. But even if WAM does not officially  exist, the fact that Louise Bourgeois is opening in Edinburgh, Mira Schendel  is at Tate Modern, Kara Walker is at the Camden Arts Centre, Ayse Erkmen is  at the Barbican and even dear old Judy Chicago is popping up at the Frieze  Art Fair suggests that someone up there is cluster-bombing us with distaff  aesthetics. WAM is happening.

The main thing that makes contemporary women’s art different from contemporary  men’s art is its obsession with identity. Having been marginalised for so  many millennia, women artists today are conspicuously determined to put  themselves at the forefront of their own expression. Going round two of the  most compelling events in the WAM schedule — the Ana Mendieta show at the  Hayward Gallery and the Sarah Lucas show at the Whitechapel — is like  trekking across a pair of Mount Rushmore-sized selfies.

Ana Mendieta (Cuba, 1948 –1985), for those who have never heard about her, was a key name of ‘70s art – one of first Latin-American artists able to enter the New Yorker scene of those years –, an iconic and versatile artist with a traumatic past signed by the exile, at the age of 12 along with her sister, to escape from Castro’s regime, and the further wandering around USA, without having the opportunity to join the other members of her family for a long time. An experience that scarred and influenced the artist, who chose during the university years to abandon painting and deal with performance, portrait, body and land art, sculpture and photography, giving to all her works the same expressive strength and intensity.

She Got The Love, the first huge European retrospective devoted to the Cuban artist, curated by Beatrice Merz and Olga Gambari, has just closed at Castello di Rivoli, while a selection of her early works are currently on view at Raffaella Cortese gallery (via Stradella, 7), along with the ones of the photo- and videographer, performer and art and culture writer Martha Rosler in a duo, all-female show which will run until August 4, 2013.

Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milano

http://www.galleriaraffaellacortese.com/exhibitions/present