Frida Kahlo Retrospective at Martin Gropius Bau Breaks Visitor Records

Written by Marc Ungermeister Saturday, 07 August 2010 22:51

BERLIN.- The exhibition dedicated to Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) at the prestigious Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin has received thousands of visitors each day who have waited in line for up to seven hours to enter. The exhibition, which closes on August 9, has broken records of visitors nearly every day since its opening in April, but in recent days, the lines are even longer and have a waiting period of four to seven hours.

Many people wait with sleeping bags to ensure entry to the largest retrospective of the Mexican artist ever presented in Germany, which only, in the first two months, received 130,000 visitors. Once inside the museum, visitors have to wait one to two hours to access the exhibition halls. Given the huge crowd, the Gropius Bau decided to extend visiting hours until 22:00 hours.

The exhibition includes about 120 works, including paintings and drawings, including a series of photographs from family archives and close friends of Frida Kahlo, as well as excerpts from the diaries of the artist.

Born July 6, 1907 in the town of Coyoacán in Mexico, Frida Kahlo survived many difficult events in her life, including contracting polio as a child, a long recovery from a serious car accident, two failed marriages, and several miscarriages.

She used these experiences, combined with strong Mexican and Native American cultural influences, to create highly personal paintings. Kahlo used personal symbolism mixed with Surrealism to express her suffering through her work. A viewer might classify her paintings as Surrealism or Magic Realism, but she considered her art to be realistic. Kahlo died July 13, 1954 of pulmonary embolism.

Frida Kahlo’s artistic development from the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) through Mexican Estridentism – an avant garde, interdisciplinary artistic movement that arose out of the Mexican Revolution – to Surrealism and her very own brand of realism, has been comprehensively presented. In addition to the famous paintings, works by Kahlo that are largely unknown or were believed to be lost are on view.

A particular highlight is a collection of about 90 drawings, some previously unpublished, and her last works dating from 1954: The self-portrait in oils as a sunflower – a work previously believed to have been destroyed – and the self-portrait drawing are being presented in Europe for the first time. The drawings with surreal compositions reveal a hitherto undiscovered side of Frida Kahlo: her humour. These light-hearted and subtle verbal and visual puns at once conceal and express her thoughts.

Another section of the exhibition has been devoted to the small-format votive paintings which the artist executed in the Mexican ex voto style in the early 1930s. They express the artist’s yearnings for health, independence and fulfilment.

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