A lesser known facet of Frida Kahlo in an exhibition in Mexico

Guadalajara, Mexico, Mar 18 (EFE).- 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 she was hospitalized due to problems in his spine and the amputation of her right leg.

In one of her photographs, Frida is lying in a hospital bed, with her hair gray and loose, a red boot that served as a prosthesis for her leg is revealed between her 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 Kahlo, a different image from the figure that the collective imagination has formed of the painter always with a strong look and pride in her clothing, the exhibition curator 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 had 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 their 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, and by the photographer Raul Anaya, close to her.

It also includes images of the leg prostheses and corsets that she wore after her accident in 1926 taken by the Mexican Graciela Iturbide, as well as the hospital gowns on which were stains from the paint that Kahlo used to create paintings such as the unfinished “My family.”

For Cristina Kahlo, her aunt used art as a way to heal her soul from the health problems that had plagued 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 said.

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. EFE

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