Homage to Frida

Frida Kahlo, Oh how I love her!

1. Yes, her strength

2. Her style! Amazing Mexican peasant clothing that was as fabulous as it was revolutionary.

3. Her work! Surrealism, portraiture, political and beautiful. Heartbreaking and self affirming, the illustrated a harrowing chain of events. Her autobiographical works told a captivating story of strength, as well as vulnerability.

4. Her legacy. Decades on, so many of us feel compelled to pay homage to Frida Kahlo. We feel an affinity with the themes she used in her work and the tragedies she overcame; subjects relevant to any time or place.

I was delighted to be invited to participate in this show, to have (more of) an excuse to immerse myself in her story, and apply it to my own work, my own legacy.

"Frida Kahlo was more like a broken Cleopatra, hiding her tortured body, her shrivelled leg, her broken foot, her orthopedic corsets, under the spectacular finery of the peasant women of Mexico, who for centuries jealously kept the ancient jewels hidden away, protected from poverty, to be displayed only at the great fiestas of the agrarian communities. The laces, the ribbons, the skirts, the rustling petticoats, the braids, the moonlike headdresses opening up her face like the wings of a dark butterfly: Frida Kahlo, showing us all that suffering could not wither, nor sickness stale, her infinite variety.

The body of Frida Kahlo, first of all. Seeing her there, once the clanging had stopped, once the silks and bracelets had rested, once the laws of gravity had imposed a stillness on the grand entrance, once the flares of the procession had died and the ceremonial halo, Aztec and Mediterranean, rabidly un-Anglo, that surrounded Kahlo had dimmed, one could only think: The body is the temple of the soul. The face is the temple of the body. And when the body breaks, the soul has no other shrine except the face.

…Kahlo portrays herself as this flayed skin, this bleeding, open skin, cut in half like a papaya fruit. For what she lives is what she paints.”

Carlos Fuentes from The Diary of Frida Kahlo

Homage to Frida Group Show 4th June - 2 July 2011

19 Karen Contemporary Art Space

Abigael Whittaker, Amanda Shelsher, Amaya Iturri, Anne Smerdon, Beck Wheeler, Ben Sheers, Dan Withey, Jeremy Piert, Jesse Dolman, Jessica Charlotte, JME Pool, Johnny Romeo, Joshua Smith, Juan Arata, Juliete Foxtrot, Kate McCarthy, Luke Yocum, Maria Rozalia Finna, Nolwenn Stephan, Rebecca Murphy, Richard Denny, Sarah Beetson, Simone Maynard, Sonya G. Peters, Will Duncan.