Mexican painter who painted her pain into self-portraits
Mexico’s most famous painter, who lived a life shadowed by pain — a road accident in her girlhood shattered her body, and the decades after passed in countless surgeries and agony. She painted it all into her self-portraits: a broken spine, a bleeding heart, entangling thorns. Fusing the bright colors of Mexican folk art with surreal imagination, direct and searing, her work has become a symbol of women’s strength and identity.
Frida painted a great many self-portraits. Bedridden after the accident, her mother fixed a mirror to the top of her bed so she could paint herself — and so painting herself became inevitable. She said: "I paint myself because I am so often alone, and because I am the subject I know best." She painted her body’s pain, her marriage’s torment, and her love of her homeland, unhidden, into portrait after portrait of her own face.
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