The Frida Kahlo in Milan exhibition begins today, 1 February, at the Mudec museum and will be open to the public until 3 June 2018. Frida Kahlo. Beyond the myth is an exhibition project six years in the making that seeks to offer a new interpretation of the artist with the inclusion of incredible new archive material.

Frida Kahlo at the Mudec

For the first time in Italy and fifteen years since the last occasion, the exhibition will bring together all of works of the Dolores Olmedo Museum of Mexico City and the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, the two largest and most important Frida Kahlo collections in the world, under one roof at Mudec – the Milan Culture Museum (via Tortona 56, Milan). A number of authoritative international museums – such as the Phoenix Art Museum, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and the Buffalo Albright-Knox Art Gallery – are also participating in the project and will be lending several masterpieces by the Mexican artist that have never been seen before in Italy.

TenderToArt and the Frida Kahlo exhibition in Milan

Thanks to the contribution of Tendercapital, for the first time outside Mexico it will be possible to admire the work “Las aparencias engañan” (Appearance are deceptive), discovered in 2007 in the secret archive of Casa Azul, the home of Frida and Diego Rivera.

The decision to support the exhibition is perfectly in keeping with the philosophy of Tendercapital, which has long been convinced that, because of its stimulating, unusual and anticonformist nature, art is a key pillar in the development of society and the individual.

With the important contribution it makes to reassessing the famous Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo. Beyond the myth forms part of the activities promoted by TenderToArt, the art incubator created in 2011 by Moreno Zani, founder and chairman of Tendercapital, a programme which every year selects artistic projects on the basis of innovation and research.

Frida Kahlo in Milan, the exhibition sections

The Frida Kahlo exhibition in Milan is divided into four sections. The first, The woman, focuses on Frida Kahlo, the first female artist to transform her body into a manifesto, to express her femininity in a direct, explicit and, at times, violent way, irrevocably revolutionising the role of women in the history of art. The body of Frida Kahlo sacrificed in front of the pitiless eyes of the public is, at the same time, an irremediably sacrificial and political body, a body that reacts and, more generally, demands equality.

The second section, The land, recalls how Frida Kahlo always identified with her Land and how her work gradually developed a renewed interest in the elements of nature, establishing through them a series of relationships distinctive for the symbolic and symbiotic interaction between the body and the natural landscape.

Frida Kahlo’s entire body of work is indisputably political in nature. The following section was therefore inevitable. In Politics the images are used to convey social resistance and opposition but without ever resorting to the mere rhetoric of ideology.

The last section is dedicated to Pain. Frida Kahlo’s art is distinctive for its powerful and expressive pictorial quality and its violent imagery which inevitably depicts pain, discomfort and deep existential malaise. The images produced by the artist bring the viewer brutally face to face with their own fears. This is why her works of pain and suffering generate discomfort, anxiety, fear and horror, never failing to make an impression on us. Frida Kahlo brings death out into the open, eliminating the barrier between what is alive and what is dead, between the personal and the impersonal.

Curator, Diego Sileo

The curator of the Frida Kahlo exhibition in Milan is Diego Sileo. Theorist, art historian and curator of the  PAC – Contemporary Art Pavillion of Milan. He has a postgraduate degree in Contemporary Art from the University of Milan and a PhD in Contemporary Latin American Art from the University of Udine.

An academic that studies the processes of aesthetic creation in South America, he has attended specialisation courses at the University of the Mexico City and the University of Buenos Aires, and in 2010 he was the only European to take part in the research project on the new Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera archive of the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City. His research has contributed to raising the profile of artists like Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, María Izquierdo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera in Italy. He has participated in numerous Italian and international conferences as a speaker on issues and problems connected with Latin American contemporary art. He is the author of the first Italian monographs of Remedios Varo (2007), Abel Azcona (2015) and Carlos Martiel (2016) and has written various essays for industry journals and exhibition catalogues.

Frida Kahlo in Milan, tickets

Tickets for the Frida Kahlo exhibition in Milan cost 15 euro (full price) while reduced prices (14-26 year-olds, over 26’s, the disabled, teachers and members of the military/forces) cost 13 euro. Tickets cost 9 euro for children of 6-13 years of age and 5 euro for 3-5 year olds.