Viewing Frida: The Making of an Icon

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.