Frida: The Making of an Icon

Frida: The Making of an Icon examines not only Frida Kahlo’s paintings but the extraordinary afterlife of her image. More than 130 works and archival objects explore how Kahlo constructed her own identity and how subsequent generations of artists, activists and audiences transformed her into a global cultural symbol.

The exhibition brings together over thirty works by Kahlo with photographs, documents, personal material and works by more than eighty other artists. These juxtapositions reveal the many identities attached to Kahlo over time: painter, political figure, feminist symbol, queer icon, Mexican cultural emblem and commercial image.

Rather than presenting biography as a closed narrative, the exhibition asks how self-fashioning and reception interact. Kahlo’s carefully controlled photographic image, clothing, relationships and political commitments are considered alongside the ways her face and story have been reproduced and reinterpreted across different social and cultural contexts.

The result is both an exhibition about Kahlo and a study of how artistic reputation is constructed. It asks how an individual artist can become larger than her work, and what is gained or lost when a complex practice becomes an international icon.

Image credit: Frida Kahlo, Self-portrait with Dr. Farill, 1951. Private collection. Photo courtesy Hauser & Wirth Collection Services.