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Lot Essay
“My art is grounded in the belief in one universal energy which runs through everything from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy,” Mendieta once explained. “My works are the irrigation veins of this universal fluid. Through them ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulations, the unconscious thoughts that animate the world. There is no past to redeem: there is the void, the orphanhood, the unbaptized earth of the beginning, the time that from within the earth looks upon us. There is above all the search for origin” (“A Selection of Statements and Notes,” Sulfur, Spring 1988, p. 72).
In her brief, but groundbreaking career, Mendieta braided earth and body across different media—film, photography, paper, stone, performance—in a practice that rippled through time, situating herself within natural, and universal, history. Born in Cuba and sent with her sister to the United States in 1961, through the Operation Pedro Pan, she spent the 1970s developing her work at the University of Iowa’s Intermedia Program, established by the German émigré Hans Breder in 1968. Many of the enduring themes of Mendieta’s work emerged during this period as she began to manipulate her body as an archetypal form, mediated through images of the Tree of Life and the “universal female,” a motif continued in the present work. Mendieta has been the subject of numerous retrospectives, most recently Ana Mendieta: Search for Origin (MO.CO Montpellier Contemporain, 2023), and she is represented in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
“For the last twelve years I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body,” Mendieta wrote in 1982. “Having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast out of the womb (Nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source. . . . The works recall prehistoric beliefs of an omnipresent female force whose body parts made the earth a living creature. In essence, my works are the reactivation of primeval beliefs at work within the human psyche” (“A Selection of Statements and Notes,” op. cit., p. 71).
La concha de Venus belongs to a series of Amategrams, created on amate (bark) paper made by indigenous Otomi artisans in Mexico, that Mendieta produced in the early 1980s. Other works in this series include The Vivification of the Flesh (1981), Mother Jungle (1981), and Labyrinth of Venus (1981), all in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The first nonphotographic and portable works that Mendieta made, these drawings variously inscribe the female body within a nurturing and ancestral cosmos, abstracting the figure through the imprint of a thick, black line. She often adapted a nested “labyrinth” figure in her work, and in La concha de Venus the line spirals outward from the center, gradually taking the shape of a body. The image suggests the oneness of woman and world, harking back to the mythical birth of Venus, goddess of love and beauty, from the waters of the sea, cradled by a scallop shell to shore. In her writings, Mendieta recounted the legend of a Cuban Black Venus—“a young black woman, nude except for a necklace and bracelets of seeds and seashells, and so lovely that ‘the most demanding artist would have considered her an example of perfect feminine beauty”—who famously resisted enslavement by the Spanish. In La concha de Venus, Mendieta honors this and every Venus—universal woman—who “represents the affirmation of a free and natural being who refused to be colonized” (“A Selection of Statements and Notes,” op. cit., pp. 72-3).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
In her brief, but groundbreaking career, Mendieta braided earth and body across different media—film, photography, paper, stone, performance—in a practice that rippled through time, situating herself within natural, and universal, history. Born in Cuba and sent with her sister to the United States in 1961, through the Operation Pedro Pan, she spent the 1970s developing her work at the University of Iowa’s Intermedia Program, established by the German émigré Hans Breder in 1968. Many of the enduring themes of Mendieta’s work emerged during this period as she began to manipulate her body as an archetypal form, mediated through images of the Tree of Life and the “universal female,” a motif continued in the present work. Mendieta has been the subject of numerous retrospectives, most recently Ana Mendieta: Search for Origin (MO.CO Montpellier Contemporain, 2023), and she is represented in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
“For the last twelve years I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body,” Mendieta wrote in 1982. “Having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast out of the womb (Nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source. . . . The works recall prehistoric beliefs of an omnipresent female force whose body parts made the earth a living creature. In essence, my works are the reactivation of primeval beliefs at work within the human psyche” (“A Selection of Statements and Notes,” op. cit., p. 71).
La concha de Venus belongs to a series of Amategrams, created on amate (bark) paper made by indigenous Otomi artisans in Mexico, that Mendieta produced in the early 1980s. Other works in this series include The Vivification of the Flesh (1981), Mother Jungle (1981), and Labyrinth of Venus (1981), all in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The first nonphotographic and portable works that Mendieta made, these drawings variously inscribe the female body within a nurturing and ancestral cosmos, abstracting the figure through the imprint of a thick, black line. She often adapted a nested “labyrinth” figure in her work, and in La concha de Venus the line spirals outward from the center, gradually taking the shape of a body. The image suggests the oneness of woman and world, harking back to the mythical birth of Venus, goddess of love and beauty, from the waters of the sea, cradled by a scallop shell to shore. In her writings, Mendieta recounted the legend of a Cuban Black Venus—“a young black woman, nude except for a necklace and bracelets of seeds and seashells, and so lovely that ‘the most demanding artist would have considered her an example of perfect feminine beauty”—who famously resisted enslavement by the Spanish. In La concha de Venus, Mendieta honors this and every Venus—universal woman—who “represents the affirmation of a free and natural being who refused to be colonized” (“A Selection of Statements and Notes,” op. cit., pp. 72-3).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park