Frida Kahlo. Oltre il mito

The catalog of the major exhibition at MUDEC – Museum of Cultures in Milan in spring 2018 has now become the reference monograph on Frida Kahlo (Feb. 1-June 3, 2018).

The major exhibition “Frida Kahlo. Beyond the Myth,” held at the MUDEC Museo delle Culture from Feb. 1 to June 3, 2018, was a huge success with the public, turning out to be the third most visited exhibition ever in Milan. The result of six years of study and research, it outlined a new key to interpreting the figure of the artist, avoiding forced reconstructions and stereotypical biographical readings, putting to use unpublished and surprising archival materials. The exhibition catalog has thus become the best reference monograph on the artist available in Italy today. The book hosts an important introduction by Diego Sileo and essays by the most influential experts on Frida, from Hayden Herrera, author of the most important biography of Kahlo, to Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera. Divided into four thematic sections (Woman, Land, Politics, Pain), it shows almost all of Frida’s paintings and, in particular, her most important masterpieces, bringing together works from the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City and the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, the two most important and extensive Frida Kahlo collections in the world, and with the participation of valuable private collections and authoritative international museums, which have lent some of the artist’s masterpieces never seen in our country (among them, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and the Buffalo Albright-Knox Art Gallery). The extremely rich iconographic apparatus complements the paintings with a group of drawings, including some previously unpublished ones from the recently discovered precious Casa Azul archives, and numerous photographs, which allow us to enter the world of Frida’s family affections and personal and intellectual relationships.

BY
Diego Sileo – Theorist, art historian and curator of the PAC Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Milan, holds a doctorate in contemporary Latin American art from the University of Udine. In 2010 he was part, as the only European member, of the research project on the new archive of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City. She has participated in numerous Italian and international conferences and has several essays for journals and exhibition catalogs to her credit.