Watermelon in art history and the important role of Frida Kahlo's one by Exibart
16 August 2024
Round in appearance, large in size, this fruit is a symbol of the summer Good Vibes, fertility, abundance and vitality, characteristics that have linked it in almost every sphere of culture and social landscape.
From its allusive and prosperous appearance, here it pops up in one of the most unforgettable scenes in the film Dirty Dancing, where the line ‘I Carried a Watermelon’ gives the fruit the symbolic power of the discovery of femininity. In 2019, Harry Styles titled one of his most famous singles Watermelon Sugar, revealing immediately the allusive and ambiguous figure of the fruit. It becomes an ode to life, the joy of sex and the sweetness of love.
The fruit also appears in paintings, hence Frida Kahlo's watermelon that, in the work Viva la Vida, links life with the juicy fruit. In the painting, which has become almost a final farewell of the artist, as it was made in the same year she passed away, the fruit depicts the desire for struggle, a struggle for life, a struggle that goes beyond life.
The fruit, with its green skin and red heart, also becomes a pop icon with the works of Wayne Thiebaud, in which slices of watermelon become vibrant protagonists. Watermelon also appears in works by Salvador Dali, Giorgio de Chirico and Giacomo Balla with a futurist watermelon. Not to mention a whole series of artists who have positioned the fruit as a protagonist, or as an element of a chorus, in countless still lives, filled baskets and fruity silhouettes.
However, everything changes and even the fruit evolves, its symbolism gets mixed up and the iconic fruit becomes something else. Over the past year, the watermelon emoji has become increasingly popular and the fruit has changed from a summer and fertility symbol into a political element of disobedience and identity desire. It has acquired the status of a graphic element to indicate support for independence and the Palestinian cause, turning into a fruit of resistance and subsistence.
The watermelon flag has older origins, since Israel began its invasion and colonisation of the territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1967 with the Six-Day War.
Since then, the fruit has increasingly penetrated political manifestations, until it has also found its way into art with this new meaning. Recent examples aree the works of Teresa Antignani and Frieda Toranzo Jaeger. Teresa Antignani, on the occasion of the Malta Biennial, presents the work Deposition, in which the watermelon appears broken, showing its red pulp under the feet of a dead Christ, placed and arranged in a contemporary, conflictual and polluted landscape. This is followed by Watermelon for Palestine, appearing at the Venice Biennale with artist Frieda Toranzo Jaeger in the work Rage Is a Machine in Times of Senselessness. The fruit is shown there, high up, in a central position, in the shape of a flag that resists in a post-human landscape.
The watermelon-flag, strongly inspired by the work of Frida Kahlo, becomes a hymn to life and to belonging to a free state, which persists and exists by fighting for its freedom.
Read here the complete article by Exibart (in Italian)
