The mighty Frida: all about her in the exhibition Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up

Showcasing Frida’s most intimate personal belongings – from artefacts to clothing – a must-have exhibition for this summer is opened at Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up is not only about Frida, the artist, as well as Frida, the human being. (Photo up: Frida Kahlo with Olmec figurine, 1939)

The exhibition will present a collection of personal artefacts and clothing belonging to the iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, never before exhibited outside Mexico.
* At Victoria & Albert Museum in London – https://www.vam.ac.uk.
* To visit – between Saturday 16th June till Saturday 4th November. 

Necklace made by Matilde Poulat, Mexico City

Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up will present some of Frida’s most intimate personal belongings, with the highlights including a Guatemalan cotton coat with Mazatec huipil belonging to the artist, a selection of Frida’s cosmetics and the prosthetic leg with a leather boot that she used to wear. Locked away for 50 years after her death, this collection has never before been exhibited outside Mexico – and it’s set to give us a fresh perspective on her incredible life story.

Guatemalan cotton coat worn with Mazatec huipil and plain floor-length skirt

This exhibition reinvents Kahlo as a 21st-century artist whose life was a kind of performance, whose self-fashioning was an act of creation and whose pill bottles are as significant as her drawings. In her lifetime, Kahlo was much less renowned than her unfaithful husband Diego Rivera, who had known Picasso in Paris before returning to Mexico to create revolutionary murals. But in the 80s, Kahlo’s paintings were rediscovered by feminists and collected by Madonna. And magnificently interpreted by Salma Hayek in the well known and awarded movie.

Frida Kahlo on a bench, carbon print, 1938, photo by Nickolas Muray © The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and The Verge, Nickolas Muray Photo Archives

Photography: courtesy of V&A Museum, https://www.vam.ac.uk.

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