An exhibition in the Mexican city of Guadalajara shows for the first time images that portray the lesser-known facet of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo during the time of hospitalization due to spinal problems and the amputation of his right leg.
In one of the photographs, Frida is lying on a hospital bed, with her gray hair loose, a red boot that served as a prosthesis for her leg is revealed between the sheets; in another, Kahlo is concentrating on a painting placed on a lectern over the hospital bed; in yet another, the painter is with her hair loose and a black Chinese suit convalescent smoking in her house.
The postcards reveal a human, vulnerable, depressed Frida Kahloa picture different from the figure that the collective imagination has formed of the painter always with a strong look and pride in her clothing, the curator of the exhibition and great-niece of the artist, Cristina Kahlo, told EFE.
“It is Frida Kahlo from a much more human point of view, It is common for her to be visualized as a character from a novel, this exhibition lands Frida Kahlo in a person of flesh and blood, who had blood flowing through her veins, who underwent these operations and we have testimonies that she was in a hospital room but that’s how she continued to be a creative artist,” she said.
The exhibition “Kahlo without borders” was inaugurated this weekend at the Museum of Arts with a hundred pieces that make public the notes of the doctors who attended the artist in her various convalescences and leg amputation, as well as photographs of her stays at the ABC Hospital in Mexico City.
The pieces were rescued by her great-niece from the archives that the hospital preserved in microchip format, as well as letters, documents and images from the family archive, since some of the most intimate photographs were taken by the curator’s father, Antonio Kahlo, or by the photographer Raúl Anaya, close to her.
It also includes pictures of the leg prostheses and corsets she wore. after her accident in 1926 taken by the Mexican Graciela Iturbide, as well as the hospital gowns on which the stains of the paint that Kahlo used to create paintings such as the unfinished “My family” remained.
For Cristina Kahlo, her aunt used art as a way to heal her soul in the face of the health problems that afflicted her since her youth.
“For her, art was a way of channeling her life, all the conflicts she could have had with Diego Rivera with his physical problems are embodied in the work, it is like an open book for us, we can read the life of Frida Kahlo through of her work and for her art was a healing issue”, she pointed out.
After being in theaters in the United States, “Kahlo without borders” will be for the first time in a museum in Mexico until August and then will be shown at the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo House-Estudio Museum in Mexico City.
Source-listindiario.com