Frida Kahlo: Beyond The Myth

After six years of study and research, the Museo delle Culture di Milano (MUDEC) in Italy presents the most important European exhibition centered on the work by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Curated by Diego Sileo, the sole European member of the archival research project at Casa Azul and curator of the Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea (PAC) in Milan, this exhibition seeks to distinguish itself from other past exhibitions about Kahlo by focusing only on the artist without including any references to the woman and wife of Diego Rivera; thus freeing Kahlo from the surrounding "myth," and separating her from the simplistic vision of "the woman with a tormented life," in order to reclaim her role as a pioneer, stylistically and thematically, in the history of art. While the "excessive" life of Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) offers more than one pretext to delve into a mythic approach, the event in Milan aims at revealing Kahlo as an activist very much aware of the influence that Diego Rivera had on her painting as well as an artist who was very interested in drawing but, above all, as a great painter. "Frida Kahlo: Beyond the Myth" consists of more than one hundred works including oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, archival photographs and written material from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman collections (two of the largest collections of works by Kahlo in the world) loaned by the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City, in addition to works from other international institutions like the Phoenix Art Museum, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and the Buffalo Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The show is divided into four core themes ("Woman, Earth, Politics, and Pain") in which a dialogue is established between the works, the historical photographs, drawings and documents, offering the necessary tools for a deeper understanding of this artist. In fact, the relationship between these elements is, academically speaking, the most interesting aspect of Kahlo's work.