![]() ![]() Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo Calderon was born at La Casa Azul (The Blue House) in Coyoacan, a town on the outskirts of Mexico City in 1907. She gathered together motifs that would repeat throughout her career, including ribbons, hair, and personal animals, and in turn, created a new and articulate means to discuss the most complex aspects of female identity. By literally exposing interior organs, and depicting her own body in a bleeding and broken state, Kahlo opened up our insides to help explain human behaviors on the outside. Indeed not only did Kahlo enter into an existing language, but she also expanded it and made it her own. Before Kahlo's efforts, the language of loss, death, and selfhood, had been relatively well investigated by some male artists (including Albrecht Dürer, Francisco Goya, and Edvard Munch), but had not yet been significantly dissected by a woman. This collection of photographs reveals the insight of those who were able to get close to her, to capture intriguing glimpses into her inner life.Frida Kahlo typically uses the visual symbolism of physical pain in a long-standing attempt to better understand emotional suffering. Kahlo’s own artistic legacy includes numerous self-portraits, often fascinatingly stylised and rich in symbolism. Muray’s carbon pigment prints–the only works featured in the exhibition in colour–with their rich yet muted hues, underscore how strikingly current these images feel, though the earliest was taken 80 years ago. In Arquin’s photograph we see painted symbols on the artist’s plaster-encased torso – a Communist hammer and sickle, and a foetus in a womb – reflecting motifs, both personal and political, which recur in Kahlo’s work.Īlso among the works on display are several portraits by Kahlo’s long-time friend and lover Nickolas Muray, whose on-again off-again affair with Kahlo spanned ten years. ![]() Stoic and determined, Kahlo continued to paint from the confines of her bed and decorated her casts. Pelvic injuries are also thought to have caused her repeated miscarriages. A near-fatal traffic accident at the age of 18 left Kahlo subjected to years of pain and repeated surgery, often confining her to a hospital bed. These photographs also bear traces of the hardships Kahlo endured – Florence Arquin’s 1951 portrait shows Kahlo lifting her blouse to reveal a body-cast beneath, meeting the viewer’s gaze boldly with a quizzical expression. A 1931 portrait by Imogen Cunningham, for example, shows the artist wearing one of her treasured necklaces dating from Mexico’s pre-Colombian era, along with earrings from the country’s colonial period. These intimate portraits serve to highlight how Kahlo expressed (through clothing and jewellery) a fierce connection to her Mexican heritage. This exceptional collection captures the multifaceted character of an intriguing artist, by turns playful, sensual, vulnerable and defiant. A range of intimate portraits of one of the 20th Century’s most iconic painters. ![]()
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