The Art Of Healing

Frida Kahlo Can Be Said To Be As Much An Icon In The Realm Of Beauty As She Is In That Of Art. Offering A Lesser-discussed Perspective To The Late Mexican Painter’s Story Is Laid Bare: Frida’s Inner World, An Exhibition Curated And Produced By The Artscience Museum That Opens This Month And Which Highlights Her Medical History That For All Its Struggles Became One Of Her Greatest Sources Of Inspiration. Cristina Kahlo Alcala Her Great-niece Who Loaned To This First-of-its-kind Showcase In Singapore Some Of Its Close To 40 Exhibits, Including Photographs, Artworks, Medical Records And Pages From The Artist’s Diary Speaks With Emma Ashlee Goh About Kahlo’s Interpretation Of Beauty That’s Got Nothing To Do With Those Brows.

The ArtScience Museum here has declared 2024 its "Year of Extraordinary Women", a theme that guides much of its programme line-up that started with Goddess, an exhibition celebrating female screen legends that opened in April, and continues on a more arty but no less enthralling bent this month. Running from May 4 to Sept 1, Fridal Forever comprises two separate showcases spotlighting the most powerful female Mexican artist to date.

There's the Asian debut of the primed-forthe-'gram Frida Kahlo: The Life Of An Icon, which features interactive projections that illuminate pivotal moments in the artist's life.

Then there's Laid Bare: Frida's Inner World, which offers a different sort of visual stimulus with its display of artefacts representing the complex medical history that would influence many of her famous self-portraits.

Perhaps much more than her deep interest in Mexican folk art or her relationship with her husband, fellow Mexican painter Diego Rivera, Kahlo's work drew from the chronic pain and medical complications that besieged her following a bus accident in 1925, when she was 18 as she once said: "I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality."

The near-fatal experience left her with multiple injuries, including serious spinal breaks, a punctured abdomen and uterus, a broken pelvis, a dislocated shoulder and 11 fractures in her right leg. In all, she was said to have undergone more than 30 surgeries in her lifetime, the last of which was to amputate her lower right limb in 1953 less than a year before her passing.