- Home page
- News
- "Inside the life of Frida Kahlo" opened today in Castel Grande, Bellinzona, Switzerland
"Inside the life of Frida Kahlo" opened today in Castel Grande, Bellinzona, Switzerland
21 November 2024
Bellinzona: until 26 January, Lucienne Bloch's shots of the Mexican painter can be admired at the Castelgrande - Introspective photographs that give us a new artist: ‘Thanks to the exhibition, we further enhance the Strength."
There is something incredibly modern about the relationship between the Mexican artist and Bloch. At the heart of the exhibition, their friendship unfolds like a photo album. Both with Central European roots, both daughters of fathers passionate about photography and music, both immersed in art and politics. Bloch, more friend than photographer, captures an authentic Frida Kahlo with her lens, revealing her spontaneous beauty. ‘Frida Kahlo was the wife of the very famous muralist Diego Rivera, at the time she was less well known than her husband, she was a woman who tried to get her message and her voice across, even freeing herself from the cumbersome presence of her husband,’ says the curator Vittoria Mainoldi.
A complicity that emerges in every shot and breaks the impassive mask of the artist from Coyoacán. Kahlo is not the austere figure immortalised by Nicholas Murray or Imogen Cunningham, but a living woman, oscillating between melancholy and irony. Frida eating an ice cream, resting on a bench, laughing when for years we believed she was incapable of doing so.
Bloch's photos do not build a myth, they dismantle it, piece by piece. ‘You see the everyday: here is a friend joking with a friend’.
Lucienne Bloch's photos approach artistic archaeology, carefully tracing the career of Frida Kahlo, when her paintings did not know they were destined for millions. In a series of shots, we see her paintings in moments of transition: resting on easels, freshly painted, and attached to walls like any other decoration.
But like any self-respecting documentary, the Swiss-American does not stop at celebrating the artist: she also recounts the pain. After an abortion, the author of ‘The Broken Column’ found comfort in Bloch's closeness. ‘Rivera begged her to go and live with them to support Frida while he was busy on the construction site of these murals,’ Mainoldi recounts. One of the most emblematic shots in the exhibition concerns the destruction of the famous mural that Rivera had created for Rockefeller Center: a work that was deemed too political and was erased before it could even be seen by the public. ‘He had an idea that this might happen. He sends Frida and Lucienne to the building site. Frida distracts the concierge by starting to chat, while Lucienne slips into the building site, climbs up onto the scaffolding and takes the only photo that exists of the mural'.
(taken from an article by the review La Regione, in Italian)
Info and details at the exhibition website below.
