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Viewing Frida: The Making of an Icon

The Wick Culture - Frida Kahlo, Untitled [Self - portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird] 1940. Nickolas Muray Collection of Mexican Art.

Above Frida Kahlo, Untitled [Self – portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird] 1940. Nickolas Muray Collection of Mexican Art.

The Wick Culture - Diego Rivera, Portrait of Frida Kahlo c.1935. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Above Diego Rivera, Portrait of Frida Kahlo c.1935. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The Wick Culture - Frida Kahlo, Memory (The Heart), 1937. Private Collection.

Above Frida Kahlo, Memory (The Heart), 1937. Private Collection.

The Wick Culture - Frida Kahlo, Survivor 1938. Colección Pérez Simón.

Above Frida Kahlo, Survivor 1938. Colección Pérez Simón.

The Wick Culture - Julien Levy, Frida Kahlo 1938. © Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

Above Julien Levy, Frida Kahlo 1938. © Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Wick Culture - Yasumasa Morimura, An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Hand Shaped Earring), 2001 ©Yasumasa Morimura; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Yoshiko Isshiki Office, Tokyo.

Above Yasumasa Morimura, An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Hand Shaped Earring), 2001 ©Yasumasa Morimura; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Yoshiko Isshiki Office, Tokyo.

The Wick Culture - Mary McCartney, Being Frida, London 2000. © Mary McCartney. Courtesy the artist.

Above Mary McCartney, Being Frida, London 2000. © Mary McCartney. Courtesy the artist.

The Wick Culture - Río Yañez, Ghetto Frida's Mission Memories 2009. © Río Yañez

Above Río Yañez, Ghetto Frida’s Mission Memories 2009. © Río Yañez

The Wick Culture - Tehuana dresses from Kahlo's archive. Museo Frida Kahlo.

Above Tehuana dresses from Kahlo’s archive. Museo Frida Kahlo.

Above Frida Kahlo, Untitled [Self – portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird] 1940. Nickolas Muray Collection of Mexican Art.

Above Diego Rivera, Portrait of Frida Kahlo c.1935. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Above Frida Kahlo, Memory (The Heart), 1937. Private Collection.

Above Frida Kahlo, Survivor 1938. Colección Pérez Simón.

Above Julien Levy, Frida Kahlo 1938. © Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

Above Yasumasa Morimura, An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Hand Shaped Earring), 2001 ©Yasumasa Morimura; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Yoshiko Isshiki Office, Tokyo.

Above Mary McCartney, Being Frida, London 2000. © Mary McCartney. Courtesy the artist.

Above Río Yañez, Ghetto Frida’s Mission Memories 2009. © Río Yañez

Above Tehuana dresses from Kahlo’s archive. Museo Frida Kahlo.

Tate Modern
Bankside
London
SE1 9TG
25 June 2026 – 3 January 2027

Frida Unbound.

She has colonised a billion tote bags, two dozen perfume bottles, and the collective unconscious of contemporary fashion. Frida Kahlo – painter, icon, myth – may be the most reproduced face of the last century. But who, exactly, was she before she became a symbol? Tate Modern‘s landmark summer exhibition, Frida: The Making of an Icon, sets out to answer that question.

The first major UK survey devoted to Kahlo in over two decades, it gathers more than thirty works – rare self-portraits, intimate photographs, clothing, and the talismanic objects of a deeply considered life – into a narrative that is at once art historical and fiercely personal. Self-Portrait (With Velvet Dress), 1926, and Self-Portrait with Loose Hair, 1938, establish Kahlo as her own most complex creation: a figure who assembled her identity from Mexican heritage, radical politics, chronic pain, desire, and an almost alchemical sense of personal style. Fashion icon she was.

The exhibition places her in dialogue with the figures who shaped her – Diego Rivera, María Izquierdo, the combustible energies of the Mexican Renaissance – before tracking the extraordinary afterlife of her image. Chicana/o artists claimed her in the late 1960s as an emblem of resistance and cultural pride; feminist artists found in her unsparing depictions of the body around childbirth, pain, sexuality , a radical precedent. Works by Judy Chicago, Ana Mendieta, Kiki Smith, Yasumasa Morimura, Martine Gutierrez, and Berenice Olmedo enter into charged conversation with her own, generating new dialogues around identity, race, and bodily autonomy that feel urgently contemporary.

The final room surrenders, gloriously, to Fridamania: over two hundred objects bearing her likeness, from Barbie dolls to tequila bottles, assembled into a fever-dream monument to the mechanics of iconography. To mark the occasion, chef Santiago Lastra from KOL has created a Kahlo-inspired menu – earthy mole, hibiscus, the bright heat of a life lived in full colour – because some exhibitions, like some food, are there to nourish something deeper. Like many of us at The Wick, we remain firmly, irreversibly, under her spell.

Viewing Allen Jones: Taking Shape

The Wick Culture - © Allen Jones Belle of Shoreditch, 2021, Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech

Above © Allen Jones Belle of Shoreditch, 2021, Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech

The Wick Culture - © Allen Jones Red Queen, 2014, Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech

Above © Allen Jones Red Queen, 2014, Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech

The Wick Culture - © Allen Jones Blue Queen, 2015, Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech

Above © Allen Jones Blue Queen, 2015, Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech

The Wick Culture - © Allen Jones Man about Town, 1986-2013, Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech

Above © Allen Jones Man about Town, 1986-2013, Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech

Above © Allen Jones Belle of Shoreditch, 2021, Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech

Above © Allen Jones Red Queen, 2014, Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech

Above © Allen Jones Blue Queen, 2015, Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech

Above © Allen Jones Man about Town, 1986-2013, Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech

Camden Arts Projects
176 Prince of Wales Road
London
NW5 3PT
5 June – 30 August

Shape-shifting.

He has spent six decades making the body strange, beautiful and perpetually unresolved. Allen Jones, British Pop Art’s great provocateur, arrives at Camden Arts Projects with Taking Shape, a survey that moves across painting and sculpture to ask a question as relevant now as it was in 1963: what does a figure do to the person looking at it?

Curated by Philip Colbert, the exhibition gathers works spanning Jones’s career alongside Aerial (2026), a monumental new commission created especially for the gallery. Suspended more than five metres above the main space, the aluminium sculpture hovers between the building’s two levels with an implausible, almost digital weightlessness – the kind of object that makes you question what you thought you understood about mass and material.

Outside, Sumo II (2006) stands guard in weathered Corten steel, its planes slowly yielding the form of a wrestler coiled for movement. Inside, Red Queen (2014) and Blue Queen (2015) pair painted timber bodies with transparent Perspex profiles whose silhouettes shift as you move, casting lines and shadows that continuously redraw themselves. Belle of Shoreditch (2020) teeters between image and object; Large Swivel (2024) invites visitors to physically reposition a figure’s leg, making every viewer a collaborator. The oil-and-montage triptych Tirez (2005), meanwhile, pulls this restless energy back onto canvas, a figure fracturing through planes like a body caught between frames. Jones has always maintained that he is, first and last, a painter.

The cultural timing could not be sharper. At this year’s Met Gala, Kim Kardashian wore a tangerine fibreglass breastplate made by Jones himself: a reworking of his Body Armour piece, originally conceived in the late 1960s for a film that was never produced, paired with a leather half-skirt hand-painted by the artist. The result merged Jones’s sculptural and painted language with the leatherwork of Whitaker Malem, creating something that sat genuinely between fashion and art object. When the most watched woman in the world commissions a 91-year-old British Pop artist to make her a sculpture to wear to the Met, the conversation Jones started about bodies, perception and the gaze is clearly far from over.

Essential viewing, and for those of us at The Wick who have always believed that art and fashion are simply different names for the same obsession, a particularly satisfying one.

Taking Shape is at Camden Arts Projects now.

Viewing Eva Dixon: Crash

The Wick Culture - Courtesy of the artist and Incubator

Above Courtesy of the artist and Incubator

Incubator
2 Chiltern Street
London
W1U 7PR
3 – 28 June

Buckle up.

Eva Dixon presses firmly on the accelerator in Crash, a new exhibition at Incubator exploring the volatile point where bodies, cars, sex and danger collide. Taking its title and atmosphere from J. G. Ballard’s novel and David Cronenberg’s 1996 film, the show brings together materials drawn from automotive culture and the erotic imagery long used to sell it. Seatbelts, tyre tubes and tensioning straps become sculptural material, tracing the narrow line between control and surrender as the body hurtles towards impact.

The Australian-born, London-based artist grew up around the visual world of their uncle’s garage, where automotive machinery and pin-up imagery occupied the same walls. An early encounter that has continued to fuel a practice concerned with the way car culture sells speed, power and masculine fantasy, all while keeping the soft and vulnerable human body strapped safely inside the machine. Across the exhibition, cars are treated as extensions of the body, imbued with fantasies of power, control, risk and escape. The crash signifies a point of rupture, where those fantasies begin to fracture.

Seductive and deliberately uncomfortable, Crash finds eros and destruction travelling in the same direction. The exhibition closes very soon – don’t miss out.