Frida Kahlo. A life in Pictures

from 21st October to 28th November 2023
Galleria d’Arte Moderna - Palermo

Frida Kahlo: A life in Pictures makes it to the Gallery of Modern Art of Palermo after the stop in Riccione. It features more than one hundred shots, mostly original, which reconstruct and tell the non-conformist story of the illustrious Mexican artist to understand what turned her into a pop icon for women at an international level.

The pictures were taken by her father Guillermo Kahlo during his daughter's childhood and youth and also by some of the paramount photographers of her time: Leo Matiz, Imogen Cunninghan, Edward Weston, Lucienne Bloch, Bernard Silbertein, Manuel and Lola Alvarez Bravo, Nickolas Muray and many more. In this extraordinary ‘photo album’ the exciting, painful and passionate events of a life unfold, while sketching the background context where her personality developed. We are in Mexico, in the early twentieth century, with the revolution that deeply changed its face and history made of campesinos and heroic figures such as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.

The epic and myth of the Mexican revolution will forge Frida’s rebellious and unconventional character, as much as the most private events of her life. She was the daughter of a professional photographer of German origin, who arrived in Mexico in 1891 and stayed in a country with whom he deeply fell in love, as evidenced by the photographs of the Mexican colonial churches he took as a commission of the Austrian government.

Painting became the favourite, visceral and passionate language of an independent and proud artist, who used the canvas as a mirror and talked about herself without softening or hiding any details. All her work is a form of self-analysis, a quest for identity and truth, equally in her self-portraits and all the works featuring Diego Rivera next to her, a painter also of murals with whom she had an intense and stormy relationship, or figures such as Leon Trotsky and André Breton.

The exhibition is divided into sections: The Blue House, dedicated to her native house in Coyoacán, a village in the outskirts of Mexico City, where the artist lived for most of her life among its cobalt-blue walls, which now houses a museum; The Mexican Revolution, illustrating, in pictures, the events that starting from the revolution in 1910 completely transformed the country and deeply influenced Frida Kahlo’s creativity and sensibility; Rufino Tamayo and Mexican art, focusing on one of the most influential painter also of murals of the twentieth century, who shared Frida’s same figurative culture between abstract painting and surrealism; Guillermo Kahlo and the Mexican churches, showing the results of the photographic campaign commissioned to Frida’s father by the Austrian government to document the baroque churches of post-colonial Mexico; and finally the section Frida on video, featuring the few filmed images left of Frida Kahlo.

The exhibition is curated by Vincenzo Sanfo and promoted by the City of Palermo, Department for Culture, and it has been organised By Civita Sicilia with the collaboration of ‘Rjma Progetti culturali’. It will be open to the public from 21 October to 28 November 2023 at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna ‘Empedocle Restivo’ of Palermo.

INFORMATION

Opening Hours:
Monday to Sunday from 9.30 am to 6.30 pm (Ticket office closes at 5.30 pm)

Tickets:

• Full price € 10,00
• Reduced € 8,00 for groups of minimum 15 people; visitors between 19 and 25, and senior citizens (65 and older); university students; teachers (not retired); holders of special discount cards (valid in Italy).
• Specially Reduced € 1,50 only for children and teen agers under the age of 18; school groups, teachers, university students of humanities and Palermo School of Fine Arts, ICOM members.
• Single ticket: exhibition + permanent collection € 6,00.
• Free Admission: for disabled people and their escort, children until the age of 6, and accredited journalists.

Info and Booking:
+39 3355453277/+39 091.8431606
(Tuesday through Sunday from 9.30 am to 6.00 pm) email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.">This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
To book guided tours for regular groups and school groups email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.