Ana Mendieta: Traces, Hayward Gallery

The Hayward Gallery is organising the UK’s first major retrospective of the Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta, giving us the chance to rediscover a ground-breaking body of art by an artist whose great significance went unacknowledged for many decades.

Ana Mendieta’s work is best known on the other side of the Altantic, and her legacy is often overshadowed by her tragic and untimely death in 1985, at the age of 36. During her short artistic life, Mendieta frequently used her naked body as a tool to explore the nature of life, death, spirituality and female identity, and this exhibition is permeated by a potent sense of her presence. This is particularly true of her Silueta Series (silhouette series) of earth-body sculptures, which she performed en route from Iowa to Mexico, and for which she is best known. In these works, she imprinted her figure on the landscape using mud, grass, blood, fire and flowers, exploring both her spiritual relationship with nature and the trauma of her displacement from her Cuban homeland to the USA during her teenage years.

Mendieta was one of the first artists to approach art in a radically multidisciplinary way and none of the labels that have previously been applied to her oeuvre, such as 'performance art', 'conceptual art' or 'body art' can fully encompass the great range of her practice. This exhibition covers her entire career and gives equal weight to the different media she employed, including the films and photographs that document her powerful performance works, and her sculptures and drawings made using natural materials such as wood, leaves, bark and blood. There is also an excellent section at the end of the exhibition that examines Mendieta's work process through her original documentary slides and negatives, many of which have never before been exhibited in public.

Her work does not fit neatly into any of the mainstream rubricsapplied to artistic activity of the 1970s, but following a cult revival on theAmerican art scene in the last decade, Ana Mendieta now holds a unique place incontemporary art history.

We’re particularly looking forward to the Southbank Centre’s accompanying programme of talks, including insights from visual arts professor Irit Rogoff (4 November) and Mendieta’s sister Raquelin (24 September). These are sure to sell out, so book while you can!

Ticket price: £11