Ana Mendieta

In a brief yet prolific career, the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta created groundbreaking work in photography, film, video, drawing, sculpture, and site-specific installations. Amongst the major themes in her work are exile, displacement, and a return to the landscape, which remain profoundly relevant today. Her unique hybrid of form and documentation, works that she titled “siluetas,” are fugitive and potent traces of the artist’s inscription of her body in the landscape, often transformed by natural elements such as fire and water.
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC, in collaboration with Galerie Lelong & Co., recently catalogued and digitized the entirety of Mendieta’s moving image works, discovering that the artist remarkably made more than 100 in the ten-year period in which she worked in the medium. The groundbreaking exhibition of her moving image works, Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta, was organized by the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota in 2014, and has since travelled to several institutions worldwide, including
NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Florida; University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; and the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris. Mendieta’s work has been the subject of six major museum retrospectives, the most recent of which, Ana Mendieta: Traces, was organized by the Hayward Gallery, England, in 2013, and travelled to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria, and the Galerie Rudolfinum, Czech Republic. Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972–1985 was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., in 2005 and travelled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; and Miami Art Museum, Florida.
Mendieta was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1948, and died in New York City in 1985.

Galerie Lelong & Co.

Galerie Lelong & Co. represents prominent contemporary artists and estates from the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. This uniquely diverse group includes mid-career and established artists at the forefront of the international art world working across all media. The gallery presents art that challenges viewers on multiple levels and diversifies dominant understandings of modern and contemporary art. While contemporary Latin American art has only recently begun to receive due recognition in the field, the gallery has been a key proponent of the region for decades, representing some of its most vital figures and presenting museum-quality exhibitions of their work. The gallery is proud to have represented Cildo Meireles, the Estate of Ana Mendieta, and Alfredo Jaar for over twenty years. Galerie Lelong & Co. has also actively engaged in the cross-generational representation of women artists at a time when women continue to be underrepresented in the art world. Etel Adnan, Zilia Sánchez, and Carolee Schneemann have been exhibiting as early as the fifties or sixties, yet their impressive bodies of work and keen visual languages have just begun to be acknowledged. The gallery also supports several artists known for their socially engaged practices, such as Alfredo Jaar, Yoko Ono, Nancy Spero, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. Contemporary sculpture is another strength of the gallery with artists such as Petah Coyne, Andy Goldsworthy, Jaume Plensa, and Ursula von Rydingsvard continually expanding the boundaries of three-dimensional expression. The gallery has a long history of working closely with prestigious museums and public institutions around the world to support the creation of new work, permanent public art projects, exhibitions both monographic and thematic, and publications on its artists. Founded in Paris in 1981 by Daniel Lelong, Jacques Dupin, and Jean Frémon, the gallery in New York opened in 1985. Directed by Mary Sabbatino, Vice President and Partner, the gallery moved to its present ground-floor location in Chelsea in 2001. Galerie Lelong & Co. is a member of the Art Dealers’ Association of America, the most esteemed organization of art galleries in the United States.