FRIDA CONSUMMATING THROUGH HER ART

By Avani Garg

Mexican painter Frida Kahlo was one of the most famous and well-known artists of the 19th century. With the intensity and emotional symbolism, she incorporates into each piece, Kahlo portrays her inner tumult and chronic pain through many of her works.

Frida Kahlo has had a major impact on art and culture. She helped introduce Hispanic culture to the art world and created a more intrepid image of women in the art world. Kahlo's openness about her gender and sexuality has made her an icon for the LGBTQ community and inspired many artists of color around the world to create a series of creative self-portraits.

Kahlo contracted the polio virus at the age of six, which left her weak and deformed. In her flexible years, she witnessed the decade-long uncertainty and plunder of the Mexican Revolution. She narrowly escaped a bus crash in her teens when the metal railings constricted and deformed her body, causing severe damage to her spinal columns and pelvic organs. Her physical and mental health problems will continue into adulthood as she battles persistent pain, infertility and depression. With poor health and chronic pain, Kahlo inevitably becomes a bright accent in her work.

Instead of hiding her disability and injuries behind shame, Kahlo uses her art to show her aching and tragedy. Her multiple self-portraits allowed her to propel her pain onto her canvases. This liberates her from the burden of dealing with her pain.

Frida Kahlo had an extremely exclusive spectacle both in terms of artistic style and portrayal of the subject. The naive brushstroke on the canvas presents a surreal depiction of inner consternation and restlessness.

The imagery of life and death, of ancestry and inheritance, plays out across this surreal landscape, suggesting not just a connection to her past, but also a meditation on her role within it—caught between the old world and her future, torn between the constraints of familial expectation and her own emerging individuality.

Kahlo's artworks are confidently autobiographical, but she frequently employs them to convey violating or political messages. The painting was finished soon after Adolf Hitler declared the Nuremberg Laws forbidding interracial marriage. Here, Kahlo uses genealogy, a form used by the Nazi Party to determine racial purity, to simultaneously declare her own mixed inheritance in opposition to her Nazi ideology. Politics aside, the red ribbon used to tie family members together echoes a theme that runs through all of Kahlo's work: the umbilical cord connecting baby Kahlo to her mother.

She remarked this painting is about "...how I imagined I was born." And in her journal, Frida said this painting depicts she was giving birth to herself.

In this painting, Frida's unnerving head emerges from her mother's womb. There are bloodstains under the mother's body, which may suggest Frida's recent miscarriage. The sheet covers the mother's face, which may have had something to do with the recent death of Frida's mother. A weeping "Madonna of Sorrow" hangs over the maternity bed. Her maiden looked at this with tears of pity and pity, but she seemed vulnerable in this situation.

In The Wounded Deer, Frida Kahlo transforms into a delicate, vulnerable creature, pierced by arrows that bleed with the weight of her pain

In The Wounded Deer, Frida envisioned herself with the body of a deer with horns on her head. Like Frida, deer are sickly prey that are pierced by nine arrows. The use of arrows can hint the ferocity of emotional and physical pain from numerous surgeries. Frida looks straight at the observer, confirming that she is alive, but the arrow will steadily kill her.

In 1946, Kahlo created The Wounded Deer, a picture of a deer with Frida’s head, pierced and bleeding from many arrows. Frida used her own pet deer, Granizo, as a mock-up for this artwork. Frida expresses the disappointment which followed the operation on her spine in New York in 1946, and which she had optimistically hoped would cure her of her back pain. Back in Mexico, nevertheless, she continued to endure both physical affliction and deep depression.

This is one of the most alluring self-portraits painted by Frida. It is a passionate expression of her deep love for nature and her endless desire to have children. This portrait shows Kahlo nutrifying the ground with her vines. For she has no roots but has roots in her womb. If you glance closely, you can see how the dry land is cleaving, and it looks like it will soon be gobbled up by the earth. This painting penetrates a graceful equilibrium between hope and despondency for life.

The storm inside her chest reflects inner chaos, while her stoic gaze confronts the viewer, unflinching in its vulnerability.

In this self-portrait, "Memory, Mind" (1937), Frida Kahlo conveys her agony and bitterness over the relationship that evolved between Diego Rivera and Cristina, her sister two years earlier. In the art, her face is deadpan and full of tears. The title, Memory propounds a collocation of image elements that refer to both her contented and miserable times. Whilst sea legs mean you're familiar with something, but Diego may be behind that elucidation. This segment of the symbolism can illustrate cold feet. She thinks maybe it's time to rebuild something in her, but her hesitation agitates her.

Kahlo's art has had a boundless influence on feminist studies and postcolonial discussions, making Kahlo an international creator. Kahlo's bequest should not be underestimated or overestimated. Not only is she considered an influential female artist active in the art world since the 1950s, but she also stirred and inspirited more than just artists and people engrossed in art. Her art also supports people suffering from unfortunate incidents, miscarriages, and disastrous marriages. Kahlo communicate these intricate experiences through her portrayal, makes them more compliant, and gives viewers her hope that they can endure, recover, and start over.