invited by Kate Bowe
Suffering greatly healthwise throughout her life, crippled in one
leg in childhood by polio, an accident at 16, undergoing more
than thirty operations in her short life, several miscarriages and
a tumultuous marriage. However because of, not in spite of
this, she became a great painter. Her raw material was herself.
When well enough, she painted the strangeness of the world
made visible. Her face. Her friends. A bowl of fruit. Flowers.
The victim of crime passionel. The sun. A dead child.
The curse of love, the disasters to which the female body
is heir. ‘Viva La Vida’, she scrawled on her last painting,
when she was about to die.
Extracts from Angela Carter’s Frida Kahlo Redstone Press, 1989
Frida Kahlo
South London Women Artists I’m Inside, Ring The Bell
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