Words Dolores O’Donoghue
A compelling exhibition at London’s Tate Modern, titled Frida: The Making of an Icon presents a fascinating exploration of how a painter from Mexico City evolved into a universal symbol of resilience, identity and radical self-expression. It delves into the visceral heart of a profoundly complex artist.
Frida Kahlo has long been mythologised as much as she has been admired, but the Tate’s new exhibition cuts through the iconography to reveal an artist who consciously constructed her own image with extraordinary precision. Bringing together painting, photography, clothing and personal objects, the show traces how Kahlo used her body, identity and lived experience as raw material for her art. What emerges is not just a portrait of suffering or spectacle, but a radical, self-aware artist who understood the power of visibility, wielding it on her own terms.
The woman behind the icon
To understand the icon, one must first under-stand the life that forged her. Born in 1907, Frida Kahlo was irrevocably shaped by a catastrophic trolleybus accident at the age of eighteen, which left her with severe injuries, chronic pain and lasting physical impairment. During months of enforced convalescence, she began to paint in earnest, using a specially adapted easel and a mirror fixed above her bed. This marked the beginning of a lifelong exploration of the self-portrait.
Her personal life proved equally turbulent. Kahlo’s passionate and volatile marriage to the muralist Diego Rivera, which she famously described as ‘the second accident’ of her life, was marked by profound artistic exchange, infidelity and emotional strain. Beyond the drama of their relationship, both were deeply committed political activists, opening their home to revolutionary thinkers and causes. Kahlo, in particular, became a fierce champion of ‘Mexicanidad’, the post-revolutionary movement that celebrated indigenous culture and national identity. It was this potent convergence of physical trauma, emotional intensity and political conviction that shaped her uncompromising artistic vision.
Pain, politics and self-creation
The exhibition opens by examining how Kahlo constructed and projected her identity through both her art and personal style. It reveals how she articulated her many ‘selves’, personal and political, physical and spiritual, with extra-ordinary intention. Iconic self-portraits such as Self-Portrait (with Velvet Dress), 1926, and Self-Portrait with Loose Hair, 1938, anchor this section. In these works, Kahlo embraces Mexican heritage, queer self-image, feminist conviction and her lived experience of disability. They are shown in dialogue with works by fellow artists of the Mexican Renaissance, including Diego Rivera’s Portrait of Frida Kahlo, c.1935, and María Izquierdo’s Dream and Premonition, 1947, situating her practice within a wider network of artistic exchange. Intimate archival material, such as her vibrant tehuana dresses and jewellery, further enriches this display.
Image courtesy Malba Foundation, Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires.
Kahlo among contemporaries
The heart of the show will focus on the Surrealist connections between Frida Kahlo and her contemporaries. Though she famously rejected the label, her work revealed striking parallels with the movement, leading its founder, André Breton, to describe her as ‘a self-made Surrealist’. Following her 1938 solo show at New York’s Julien Levy Gallery, Breton invited her to exhibit in Paris, where her self-portrait, The Frame, 1938, was acquired by the French national collection. Tate Modern presents this work along with other key paintings, including Diego and Frida, 1929; Survivor, 1938; Memory (The Heart), 1937; and Girl with a Death Mask, 1938. These pivotal works are shown alongside paintings and photographs by Latin American artists including Kati Horna and Leonor Fini, revealing shared Surrealist preoccupations with death, dreaming, masks and the body.
From artist to global symbol
The exhibition culminates in a provocative examination of Kahlo’s afterlife as a global icon. A dedicated room charts her transformation from artist to brand through ‘Fridamania’, presenting more than 200 mass-produced objects ranging
from fashion and perfume to tequila bottles and dolls that trade on her unmistakable image. Alongside pop-cultural ephemera, the inclusion of Hayden Herrera’s landmark 1983 biography, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, now translated into more than twenty-five languages, marks a key moment in the consolidation of her myth. Rather than dismissing this phenomenon, the exhibition invites reflection on how Kahlo’s radical ideas around identity, gender and the body have been simplified, commoditised and yet continually reclaimed, positioning her enduring visibility as the complex final chapter of her act of self-construction.
Frida: The Making of an Icon runs from 25 June 2026 to 3 January 2027 at Tate Modern, London.
- ‘Frida Kahlo at Tate Modern: The self-crafted icon’ is published in Anthology Volume 25. Read more features from this volume or buy it now.
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