Tag: Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954, Coyoacán, Mexico City) forged a fiercely personal body of work that transformed pain, identity and lived experience into enduring visual language. Best known for her uncompromising self-portraits, Kahlo used her own body as both subject and symbol—rendering physical injury, emotional rupture, love and loss with raw clarity and symbolic intensity.

Her paintings blend realism with elements of surrealism, Mexican folk art and pre-Columbian imagery. Animals, plants, religious motifs and medical references recur as charged emblems, weaving together personal narrative with cultural and political identity. Colour is bold and deliberate, composition frontal and direct, allowing each image to confront the viewer without mediation.

Kahlo’s work resists romanticisation. It is unsentimental, precise and resolute—an insistence on visibility in the face of suffering and marginalisation. Long reduced to myth, her practice now stands in full complexity: not as autobiography alone, but as a radical redefinition of how the self, the body and national identity can be painted.

Tate Modern and the Making of Frida Kahlo as a Global Icon

21 January 2026 • Mark Westall

The first major exhibition to examine how Frida Kahlo became one of the most recognisable and influential figures in global culture.

Sotheby’s does over $1 billion in a week

21 November 2025 • Mark Westall

In the wake of the success of the collection of Leonard A. Lauder on Tuesday evening, further exceptional collections were presented for sale in Sotheby’s new home at the Breuer.