The project is curated by Helga Prignitz-Poda, author of the artist's catalog raisonné. The exhibition documents the entire artistic career of Frida Kahlo bringing together the absolute masterpieces of the main collections, public and private collections, from Mexico, Europe and the United States.
The exhibition was made possible thanks to the contribution of Enel as main sponsor and thanks to the support of Gioco del Lotto-Lottomatica, Electa, BioNike and Etro.
A special thanks is addressed to the Mexican sponsoring institutions which, with their generous and decisive support, have made the realization of the enterprise possible: Embajada de México in Italy; Agencia Mexicana de Cooperaciòn internacional para el Desarrollo de la Secretarìa de Relaciones externales (AMEXCID/SRE); National Council for Culture and the Arts (CONACULTA); National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA); Government of the State of Tlaxcala Instituto Cultural Tlaxcalteca Museo de Arte de Tlaxcala; Banamex. National Bank of Mexico.
The exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale is part of a joint project that Rome and Genoa are presenting with two major exhibitions dedicated to the work of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. "Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera" at Palazzo Ducale in Genoa from 20 September, will tell the story of the other great influence that is perceived in Frida's art, the one that comes from her private universe, at the center of which she will always place husband Diego.
Over forty extraordinary portraits and self-portraits, including the famous "Self-portrait with thorn necklace" from 40, never exhibited before in Italy and image of the exhibition, the "Self-portrait with velvet dress" from 26, hand painted only 19 years old, her first self-portrait, executed for her beloved Alejandro Gòmez Arias with the intention of winning him back, in which she is inspired by Botticelli and Bronzino with the intention of making her self-portrait a modern icon, imbued with glamor and eroticism.
The project is completed by a selection of drawings, including the "pencil sketch for the painting Henry Ford Hospital (or The Flying Bed)" from 32, the famous "plaster corset" that held Frida prisoner immediately after the accident and which he painted even before moving on to portraits – a unique piece believed lost until recently, and finally some exceptional photographic portraits of the artist, in particular those made by Nickolas Muray, Frida's lover for ten years, and among them “Frida on the White Bench, New York, 1939” later became a famous cover of Vogue magazine.
One cannot understand Frida Kahlo's work without knowing her life. Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón said she was born in 1910, while she was actually born on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacán (Mexico City). She loved to consider herself the daughter of the Mexican revolution which began in 1910 and ended in 1917: “I was born with a revolution. Let's face it. It was in that fire that I was born, carried by the impetus of the revolt until it was time to see day. The day was hot. It inflamed me for the rest of my life. I was born in 1910. It was summer. Soon Emiliano Zapata, el Gran Insurrecto, would revolt the south. I had this luck: 1910 is my date”.
There is no doubt that the myth formed around the figure and work of Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) has now taken on a global dimension: undisputed icon of twentieth-century Mexican culture, revered forerunner of the feminist movement, cult brand of universal merchandising, seductive subject of Hollywood cinema, the first Hispanic woman portrayed on a US postage stamp, Frida Kahlo offers herself to contemporary culture through an inextricable link between art and life, one of the most fascinating in the history of the XNUMXth century.
Her paintings are not only the mirror of her biographical story, marked by the physical and mental injuries suffered in the terrible accident in which she was involved at the age of 17. Her art blends with the history and spirit of the contemporary world, reflecting the social and cultural transformations that led to and followed the Mexican Revolution. Through the revolutionary spirit she reinterpreted the indigenous past and folk traditions, identity codes
generators of an unprecedented fusion between self-expression, language, imagery, colors and symbols of Mexican popular culture. At the same time Frida is an expression of the artistic avant-garde and cultural exuberance of her time and the study of her work allows us to understand the interweaving of all the international cultural movements that crossed Mexico at that time: from revolutionary Pauperism to Stridentism, from Surrealism to what decades later took the name of Magic Realism.
In the exhibition it is possible to discover the intertwining with the different movements through the combination of some paintings by Frida with works by artists such as Gino Severini, one of the authors of the futurist manifesto, Carlo Mense, one of the exponents of the New Objectivity, Roland Penrose, surrealist from which Frida takes her cue for her Self-Portrait with a Necklace of Thorns, and Giorgio De Chirico whose metaphysical art and poetics was well known to Frida Kahlo. In April 1938 André Breton, theorist of Surrealism, arrived in Mexico with his wife Jacqueline Lamba and was a guest in Rivera's studio house. Meanwhile Frida had offered hospitality in Coyoacán to the Russian revolutionary Lev Trotsky and his wife Natalia, fleeing from Stalin, to whom Mexico had given asylum thanks to Rivera's intervention. It was in Mexico City that Trotsky, Breton and Rivera wrote the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, in which they claimed absolute freedom of artistic thought.
Breton recognized in Frida Kahlo's paintings a peculiar form of surrealism typical of the Mexican character and signed the Preface to the catalog of the Frida exhibition held in New York that same year. The latter was very close to the Surrealist movement, to its protagonists, to their conceptions of art. In 1944 he wrote: "Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a closet where you are sure to find shirts", an image that well represents his idea of the surrealist intellectual game.
Frida painted a series of some small self-portraits, in which she directed her desires towards a transcendent world, portraying them in the style of traditional ex votos. These images should be read not only as a recovery of a form of popular art, but also as real desires aimed at anticipating destiny. This leap towards a transcendental world reveals in the artist a broad spectrum of surreal hopes and desires.
The main theme remains that of self-representation, which Frida elaborates through the main languages of the various eras in a process in which she forgets all paternity. The numerical weight that the "self-portrait" genre assumes in the artist's overall production restores the very special meaning that it has represented in the transmission of the iconographic, psychological and cultural values of the "Frida myth".
The exhibition itinerary intends to present and deepen the artistic production of Frida Kahlo in its evolution, from the beginnings still indebted to the New Objectivity and Magical Realism to the revival of folkloric and ancestral art, from the reflections of American realism of the twenties and thirties to the ideological components policies inspired by Mexican muralism and the exhibition wants to account for these influences. It will therefore be possible to admire next to Frida's works
Kahlo, in a unique and rare exhibition itinerary, a selection of works by artists active in that period who "lived" physically and artistically close to Frida Kahlo, by her husband Diego Rivera, present with some significant works such as, for example: "Portrait of Natasha Gelman" from 1943", "Nude (Frida Kahlo)" from 1930 and "Self-Portrait" from 1948; to a selection of artists active in that period such as: José David Alfaro Siqueiros, Maria Izquierdo, Abraham Angel and others.
“… I have an immense happiness to live…”
“…rebellion with all that encadena you…”
“…yo soy la disintegración…”
FRIDA KAHLO
from 20 March to 31 August 2014
Scuderie del Quirinale – Rome –
Attachments: 07_Frida Kahlo in words.pdf
