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FRIDA KAHLO

Beyond the myth

Curated by Diego Sileo

MUDEC - Museo delle Culture, Milan
February 1st - June 3rd, 2018

Beyond the myth

Frida Kahlo was very seductive and continues to be also 110 years after her birth. This is why the city of Milan is staging the most important European exhibition ever devoted to the most famous and acclaimed Mexican woman painter. This show and tribute will be held from February 1, 2018 to June 3, 2018 at the new Museum of Cultures (MUDEC) of Milan designed by David Chipperfield (www.mudec.it). The exhibition will include oils, drawings, watercolours, letters and photographs, and we intend to bring together works by Frida that have never been displayed in Italy before.
The exhibition will point out that Frida still holds many secrets. Apart from the numerous books that have been written about her, the Milan event will reveal, through artworks and documents, that Frida Kahlo was in effect a political activist, that she was aware of Diego Rivera’s influence on her painting and sought to avoid it, that she had a keen interest in drawing and, above all, that she was a great painter. It will also show that as well as expressing herself dramatically in her painting, Frida was also extremely witty and ironical, and brought a sensuality to her still lifes, like nobody else.
The Milan exhibition has already obtained the loan of works from the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City and from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection.

We are not only concerned with quantity, however, and the paintings and other works on display will be selected according to an analytical criterion, since the point of this exhibition is that the content will differ from all the others on Frida Kahlo staged in the past.

“The legend that has been created around the life of the artist only helped to obscure the knowledge of her poetics”.

DIEGO SILEO, CURATOR OF THE EXHIBITION

JULY 6, 1907 – JULY 13, 1954

FRIDA KAHLO

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón was born in Coyoacán, Mexico City, the third of four children of Matilde Calderón’s marriage with the German photographer Guillermo Kahlo. She often declared that she was born in 1910, coinciding with the Mexican Revolution…