- Born
- 6 July 1907Coyoacán, Mexico City, Mexico
- Died
- 13 July 1954Coyoacán, Mexico City, Mexico · aged 47
Frida Kahlo
A Mexican painter whose self-portraits made the body a place of pain, invention and self-definition.
Frida Kahlo was born in Coyoacán in 1907. Polio affected one of her legs in childhood, and a bus accident at eighteen left her with lasting injuries. During her recovery she began painting, often using her own reflection as a subject.
She married Diego Rivera in 1929. Their relationship included separations and affairs, a divorce in 1939 and remarriage in 1940. Kahlo’s relationships with both men and women formed part of a private life that was as independent and complicated as the identities she presented in her paintings.
Her work draws on Mexican visual traditions while giving physical form to pain, grief and emotional conflict. In “Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair” (1940), she sits in a loose man’s suit amid the hair she has cut away. The painting unsettles expectations of femininity without reducing its subject to a single explanation.
Kahlo’s international reputation grew, though illness repeatedly interrupted her work. She died at the Blue House in Coyoacán in 1954, aged 47. Her paintings have since become central to discussions of disability, Mexican identity, feminism and queer life, as well as to the history of modern art.