Leaf rubbing cut into the shape of a leaf
23.9 x 16.7 cm (framed)

In 1983, Ana Mendieta was awarded the Prix de Rome fellowship by the American Academy in Rome. Her residency in Italy marked a shift from working mainly outdoors toward studio-based sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. As the site of her work’s production moved indoors, it enabled a permanence in form that her “earth-body” works had only achieved through their documentation in photography and film. What remained was a continuity in terms of her use of natural materials, and the preeminence of the silhouette as the central form in her work. Themes of life and regeneration and the issue of her work’s temporality were sustained as core dimensions of her practice, despite the more traditional, static nature of its composition. Many of the materials Mendieta employed in this new body of work—including fresh leaves, amate (bark) paper, mud, earth, and plant roots—were susceptible to the effects of time. Processes of decomposition altered their structure, manifesting in changes to their color and texture in ways that made their natural life cycles integral to the work. Mendieta used to say that if she could reduce her body to a basic shape it would be a leaf at the moment when it falls from the tree to the ground to decompose into the soil, returning to be a part of it. In this new phase, therefore, the leaf—often combined with the imagery of Mendieta’s well-known silhouettes—became instrumental in portraying the artist’s thematic “return to the origin.” This untitled work represents one of a series that were collated in the artist’s book Pietre Foglie (Rome, 1984).

PAST LOANS

Group exhibition: Abundant Futures
Venue: C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba  
Curator: Daniela Zyman
Exhibition 1 April 2022 - 5 March 2023

Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1948. Died in New York, USA, in 1985.