After being in theaters in the United States, this exhibition 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.
The photos show a lesser-known side of Frida Kahlo's life, the time she spent in the hospital being treated for spinal issues and having her right leg amputated.
A red boot that served as a prosthesis for her leg is visible beneath her blankets in one of Frida Kahlo's images of her laying in a hospital bed, and in another, she is focusing on a painting that is displayed on a lectern above the bed. Another shows the painter smoking in her home while recuperating, her hair unbound and dressed in a black Chinese suit.
"Kahlo without borders" includes 100 pieces that include images and comments from the medical professionals who treated the artist during her multiple convalescences and leg amputations.
Cristina Kahlo, the director of the exhibition, is Frida Kahlo's great-niece.
"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 "
Since some of the most private photographs were taken by the curator's father Antonio Kahlo and by the photographer Raul Anaya, close to her, the pieces were salvaged from the archives that the hospital maintained in microchip format, together with letters, documents, and images from the family archive.
It also includes photographs of the leg prosthesis and corsets she wore following her injury in 1926, photographed by the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, as well as the hospital gowns covered in paint stains from Kahlo's unfinished "My family" painting.
Click here for info on the US exhibition in 2022.
Exhibition website in Spanish at the link below.