Pelvic injuries are also thought to have caused her repeated miscarriages. A near-fatal traffic accident at the age of 18 left Kahlo subjected to years of pain and repeated surgery, often confining her to a hospital bed. These photographs also bear traces of the hardships Kahlo endured – Florence Arquin’s 1951 portrait shows Kahlo lifting her blouse to reveal a body-cast beneath, meeting the viewer’s gaze boldly with a quizzical expression. A 1931 portrait by Imogen Cunningham, for example, shows the artist wearing one of her treasured necklaces dating from Mexico’s pre-Colombian era, along with earrings from the country’s colonial period. These intimate portraits serve to highlight how Kahlo expressed (through clothing and jewellery) a fierce connection to her Mexican heritage. This exceptional collection captures the multifaceted character of an intriguing artist, by turns playful, sensual, vulnerable and defiant. I painted my own reality.A range of intimate portraits of one of the 20th Century’s most iconic painters. In an interview she once proclaimed, "They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. Although she was called a Surrealist by André Breton, Kahlo culled her imagery from her own reality, a strategy that separated her paintings from those of the Surrealists. Her paintings form an organic and realist alternative to the austerity of Modernism and the more detached, dreamlike quality of Surrealism. Through her relationships with Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, Kahlo was intimately familiar with Mexican mural painting and its grand ambitions, but she chose to follow a different artistic path.
#FRIDA KAHLO PORTRAITS SERIES#
The works from the last years of her life reflect the increased intensity of her political views and her ongoing identification with nature, as seen in a series of still life paintings. In later self-portraits, she isolated her own image and surrounded herself with natural motifs such as animals and foliage. The pictures (mostly portraits) that Kahlo painted in San Francisco reveal her interest in nineteenth-century Mexican folk portraiture and popular art. While visiting San Francisco in 19 with her husband, the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, her style moved from abroad, mural-like handling to a folkloric mode based on nineteenth-century Mexican portraiture. But it is a revaluing of the culture and ethos of indigenous Mexico, or Mexicanidad, that drives the entirety of her oeuvre. Kahlo's political responses to capitalism and industrial growth inform many of her early works.
Many of her paintings merge depictions of the cosmos, the earth, and the body with the artist's immediate reality, permitting shockingly personal depictions of her physical and psychological pain to bleed into the iconography of Mexico's Aztec, colonial, and revolutionary history. She explored these subjects in a deceptively naive manner, often drawing on folk art traditions. Actively reinventing herself throughout her career, Frida Kahlo created potent representations of her identity, her native Mexico, and the historical epoch in which she lived.
0 kommentar(er)
