Tate Modern Show Traces Frida Kahlo's Path From Student to Global Icon

The exhibition comes twenty years after the British institution's major retrospective devoted to the artist. Kahlo (1907-1954) painted 143 canvases, including 55 self-portraits, channeling her physical and moral suffering into a style that is both raw and sensual. Her powerful personality and complex identity have left an indelible mark on art and on her era, growing exponentially in influence up to the present day.

It is impossible to separate the life and work of this singular person. Her paintings constitute her biography, wrote writer and art critic José Moreno Villa (1887-1955) on the occasion of the artist's first monographic exhibition, held in Mexico City in 1953. Stricken with polio at age 6, Kahlo had intended to become a doctor and was one of the few girls at her prestigious Mexico City high school when, in 1925, at age 18, a serious bus accident shattered her spine, her pelvis, and her dreams of study. The Tate Modern's new show examines the shift from that young Mexican painter to the global icon she has become.