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Frida Kahlo is an iconic artist, her face is widely recognized due to her exemplary portraits filled with surreal totemic imagery and magical realism. Her activism was a key part of her identity, attending political demonstrations until some of her final days. Her work commonly contain elements of her internal world, both emotionally and literally. A life severely impacted by disability and recurring surgery, Kahlo's explicit honesty in her depictions show the horror of a body disembodied.
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Mexican Modern Art begins as the Mexican Revolution comes to an end in 1920. After overthrowing an authoritarian system, the new government commissioned large scale Murals. Functionally, these works were a means of mass communication with.a largely illiterate population, and increased social solidarity aligning with the new values that came of the revolution. Visually, these murals use a combination of identifiable imagery and figures to illustrate the cultural past and a utopian future.
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Frida Kahlo
Henry Ford Hospital
Oil on metal
12.0 in × 15 in
Dolores Olmedo Museum, Xochimilco, Mexico City In a transcendent magical-realist portrait we see identifying elements of representative objects surrounding a weeping, naked Frida centered on a hospital bed in a desolate land outside of industrial Detroit. In the Henry Ford Hospital Frida experienced the medical trauma of pregnancy loss. Anatomical models surround her as red ribbons show her connection to these internal destructions. -
Diego Rivera
Man, Controller of the Universe
Fresco
4.85 x 11.45 m
Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City Rivera's mural combines fantastical elements with real world figures and imagery to create magical realism. The base center of our image shows agricultural roots, bisected in the soil powering the center industrial machine. Flanked by figures of communism, darwinism, war, religion revolution- this work educates the working class, and aligns nationalism with logic and utopian progression. -
Jose Clemente Orozco
The Epic of American Civilization
fresco/mural
Reading Room, Baker Memorial Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire This expansive 24 panel mural illustrates stages of Mexican history including Aztec roots, impacts of European colonialism, the modern post-revolution industrial era. With the color palette of red white and blue, Orozco's mural utilizes magical realism to contort horrifying representations of imperialism and religious colonialism into monsters. -
o/c
36 in × 27.75 in
Collection of Daniel Filipacchi, Paris From Frida's bathing perspective, this portrait consists of disembodied pieces of the artist, depicting a faceless portrait of an internal self. Disturbing textures allude to a petri dish, with a surreal leaking shell, a strangled body tethered to an island figure, two nude women sharing a bed. An industrial skyscraper juxtaposed in eruption from a volcano portrays modern Mexican Art's typical juxtapositions of earth and industry -
David Alfaro Siqueiros
New Democracy
Pyroxylin on panel,
20’ x 40’
Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City, Mexico This graphic work shows the allegorical personification of Justice breaching from the earth in reference the end of fascist violence in WWII. In one hand the flaming torch, and the other a lily representing peace as war ends. As a veteran, Siqueiros depictions of a menacing flesh colored war torn landscape and a fallen solider add to the political and visceral impact of this work. -
Without Hope
Oil on Masonite
11” x 14”
Dolores Olmedo Collection
Mexico City, México Painted in her increasingly painful years, this work shows the bedridden artist being force fed a horrifying amalgamation of living and frat creatures, overflowing from the funnel. Frida captures a feeling of inhumanity when she is being medically treated. As further intervention is needing, her body is smaller, even less her own. She's bound to earth under a biological planetary blanket, lost and disempower.