An exhibition entitled “Frida Kahlo‘Beyond Appearances’, inaugurated Thursday at the Gallera Ballet Fashion Museum in Parisand continues until March 2023, to highlight the link between some two hundred pieces of the Mexican artist’s personal effects and his artwork.
“We want to get away from the grotesque that surrounds it and for people to see that it is more than just a commodity or an image,” exhibition curator Serce Inestrosa told AFP.
Fashion fanatic
This exhibition first arrives in Paris, where the artist visited in 1939 at the invitation of his friend, the French writer and poet André Breton. But the event took place in London, San Francisco and New York and each time the curator adapted his details to the host city.
The edition in the “Capital of Fashion” presents garments by great designers such as Alexander McQueen, Jean Paul Gaultier and Valentino, directly inspired by Frida’s style.
The exhibition includes, for example, a dress with a veil, reminiscent of the “Resplandor”, a ritual-inspired veil worn by women from the Teuantepec region in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, as well as skirts, jackets and trousers decorated with flowers, tulle and rhinestones, and even metal corsets.
However, the most important pieces exhibited during this event are the personal effects of the late artist, which the French public will be able to see for the first time.
These personal pieces include a large collection of photographs, telegrams, and letters, which were exhibited a decade ago in the Frida Kahlo Museum, Casa Asul, or the Blue House, the artist’s birthplace where her husband, the painter Diego Rivera, he kept them for half a century in a large suitcase.
The collection is rich in many objects, including a prosthetic leg with shoes decorated with Chinese embroidery, which Kalu wore after the amputation of his right leg, an orthopedic corset very similar to the one depicted by the artist in his painting “The broken column “and painted corsets, one of which bears the hammer and sickle emblem, in memory of his Communist embrace, pre-Columbian necklaces and even drugs testify to his physical suffering after contracting polio and a serious bus accident.
“We don’t show anything that Frida Kahlo didn’t want to show,” explains the curator of the show, saying she wanted to “break with the rhetoric of the 1980s that insisted on portraying Kahlo and his body as a victim.”
He adds: “Of course, he suffered a lot from a physical point of view, but through this exhibition we see how he used painting as a means of healing and creative production”.
“The painted corsets symbolize rebellion and she made them a staple in her dress. Why wear a bad prosthesis? She made us nice shoes, it’s very fashionable,” notes Inestrosa.
Many costumes are on display, most notably her famous traditional embroidered skirts and sleeveless long jackets, along with some paintings, including The Frame, the first painting by a Mexican artist acquired by the French state.
Would Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) have “appropriated” the culture of fashion linked to the Teuantepec region even if she had never set foot there? “No, it’s her personal inheritance from her mother,” replies Inestrosa, a multi-rooted, Hispanic and indigenous woman from Oaxaca, near Teuantepec.
The curator notes that Frida Kahlo was not only proud of it, but chose “the Tihuana dresses of a matriarchal society (in Teuantepec), to focus on a strong woman. While fashion in Mexico in the 1930s was Parisian fashion”.
(AFP)
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