Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving: Exceptional Garments Alongside 34 of Her Drawings and Paintings
Press Release in Spanish here.
In 1930, Frida Kahlo left Mexico for the first time and traveled to San Francisco. This experience was deeply influential, shaping Kahlo’s self-fashioned identity and launching her artistic path. In Spring 2020, she returns to San Francisco with the intimate exhibition Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving at the de Young museum. Offering a perspective on the iconic artist unknown to most, the exhibition reveals the ways in which politics, gender, disability, and national identity informed Kahlo’s life, art, and multifaceted creativity.
Making its West Coast premiere, Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving will feature a selection of Kahlo’s possessions from her lifelong home, La Casa Azul, now the Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico City. Locked away following Kahlo’s passing in 1954, these poignant items were unsealed in 2004, fifty years after her death. The exhibition presents these personal belongings — including photographs, letters, jewelry, cosmetics, medical corsets, and exceptional garments — alongside 34 of Kahlo’s drawings, paintings, and a lithograph that span Kahlo’s entire adult life.
Right, Nickolas Muray, Frida on White Bench, New York City, 1939. Nickolas Muray Photo Archives
“Reinforcing our institution's long-standing close ties to Mexico, we are infinitely honored and thrilled to present Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving at the de Young museum,” states Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “The landmark exhibition paints a multifaceted portrait of one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century; whose vivid work provides an important window into Mexican culture, and whose extraordinary persona continues to be a source of inspiration to so many."
Today, Kahlo is known for her distinctive personal style as much as for her extraordinary art. She took great care with her appearance and constructed her personal image as meticulously as her paintings. Her image, immortalized in her own self-portraits and through the lens of such photographers as Nickolas Muray, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Gisèle Freund, and Lola Álvarez Bravo, is now instantly recognizable. Since her death, Kahlo has become an icon, her likeness reproduced in books, murals, shopping bags, socks, and even a controversial Barbie doll by Mattel.
“The exhibition gives a very personal experience with deeply individualized objects on view. Kahlo never allowed her disabilities define her — she defined who she was in her own terms,” states Circe Henestrosa, guest curator of exhibition. “Kahlo decorated and painted her corsets, making them appear as though she had explicitly chosen to wear them. She included them in her art and in the construction of her style as an essential wardrobe item, almost as a second skin.”
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