The first solo UK exhibition devoted to this celebrated Mexican artist. Eighty works are on display, including her poignantly beautiful self portraits and lush still lifes.
The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) and Diego rivera's Wife is now regarded as one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century and this is the first major UK exhibition dedicated to her work to take place for over twenty years.
Kahlo is variously enshrined in the popular imagination as a bohemian artist, a victim turned survivor, proto-feminist, sexual adventurer who challenged gender boundaries, and, with her mixed-race parentage, an embodiment of a hybrid, postcolonial world.
"In 1953, when Frida Kahlo had her first solo exhibition in Mexico (the only one held in her native country during her lifetime), a local critic wrote: 'It is impossible to separate the life and work of this extraordinary person. Her paintings are her biography.' This observation serves to explain both why her work is so different from that of her contemporaries, the Mexican Muralists, and why she has since become a feminist icon
Between 1926, when she made her first self-portrait, and her death in 1954, Kahlo produced around 200 images. Certainly the biographical details of her remarkable life inflect many aspects of her work, yet her depiction of her body and experiences can also be seen as a response to wider cultural and political debates. For all their apparent naivety, her works frequently reveal an incendiary subtext, whether they are questioning power relationships between developed and developing nations, testing the role of women within a patriarchal society, or attempting to reconcile the global histories and religions of East and West.
.jpg)
