Female Mexican painter Frida Kahlo was an evolutionary artist. She was proud, bold and unapologetic throughout her life and within her work. The Frida Kahlo fall exhibition at the New York Botanical Gardens was an exquisite triumph, successfully showcasing the late talent’s remarkable grasp on the natural world. The show was titled Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life and her work featured a plethora of meticulously crafted images of plants, gardens and human life.
The show presented a display of many original paintings and re-created the artist’s garden and studio at the Casa Azul, her childhood home in Mexico City, which she returned to later in life. It included a gorgeous re-imagining of Kahlo’s studio overlooking the garden. The words, “Frida y Diego vivieron en esta casa, 1929-1954” (“Frida and Diego lived in this house, 1929-1954”) are inscribed on the garden wall, referring to Kahlo’s husband Diego Rivera, the man with whom she shared the garden.
The evocation of her garden in the Haupt Conservatory was flawless, enabling the show’s viewers to take a step into Kahlo’s creative wonderland. In the re-imagining of Kahlo’s studio, Frida’s work desk was recreated with a set of multicolored paint viles, screwed on with corks. The table, beaten with splashes of paint, referenced many years of hard work. Most fascinatingly Kahlo placed a globe on her desk along with a set of books, resembling her zest for creation and discovery. The plant life surrounding the house was convincingly similar to the exotic foliage of Mexico, which significantly enhanced the feeling of truly having entered Frida’s world.
A diverse selection of some of Kahlo’s paintings and drawings were on display in a small but intimate exhibition room. In one of the first paintings upon entering, Portrait of Luther Burbank, Kahlo presented Burbank as a hybrid in the form of half man, half tree, which was symbolic of Burbank’s place of burial under a tree. In this painting, nature remarkably combined both realism and imagination, which would considerably be an oxymoron to most. There is an interesting juxtaposition of a tree which is symbolic of nurturing life, with its roots emerging from a dead body. However, Kahlo’s art uniquely brings life to death, or as she called it, “the fertilization of life by death.”
Kahlo has been famously quoted saying, “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.” In Kahlo’s famous self portrait, The Last Leaf, she presents herself as prey to suffering. One may interpret this piece as an example of one who has no control over external circumstance. In the image, her neck is pierced by thorns. The animals of nature are feeding off of her as if she was a figment of the wild. Some describe her work as possessing a dreamlike, surrealist quality to it, but she disarmed this perception as she so often claimed; “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”
Frida Kahlo’s connection with Mexican culture, nature and humanity, in a beautiful way, brought life to the many themes of the world around us: hybridity, sexuality, culture, life, death, fertility, infertility, injury, perception and gender. In Kahlo’s Self Portrait Inside A Sunflower, she presented a burning sun within a tilted perspective. The piece is painted with a burning intensity, depicting a conflicted woman contemplating the confusing world around her.
“I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.” These words of Frida’s characterize the beauty in the way she lived her life as a female artist. It was a delight to study the work of a woman who carries herself with class, confidence and a strong belief in self-expression. She successfully bridged dichotomies within gender to disseminate the values of equality and tolerance. She also depicted, with striking honesty, the experience of what it is to be female. This exhibit was certainly something not to be missed.