alisonlittleblog

https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-4000887400212447

Few artists have become as instantly recognisable as Frida Kahlo. Her distinctive appearance, elaborate clothing, flowers, eyebrows and intensely personal paintings have transformed her from a celebrated Mexican artist into a global cultural icon.

Frida: The Making of an Icon at Tate Modern explores precisely how this transformation happened. The exhibition runs from 25 June 2026 to 3 January 2027 at Tate Modern, Level 3, Natalie Bell Building, London. Tate describes it as the first major exhibition to explore how Kahlo became a global icon and a key influence on generations of artists.

For anyone interested in Frida Kahlo, modern art, feminist art, Mexican art or art exhibitions in London, this is an important exhibition to put on the list.

A Very Busy Tate Modern Exhibition

My visit to the exhibition became something of an endurance test.

I arrived at around 11:00 a.m., having made the mistake of not booking my Frida Kahlo ticket sufficiently far in advance. Although I was already at Tate Modern, I couldn’t enter the exhibition until 4:00 p.m.

The exhibition is extremely popular, and the galleries can feel crowded. The limited space becomes particularly noticeable around the larger Kahlo paintings, where several visitors naturally gather to get a closer look.

Is Everything in the Exhibition by Frida Kahlo?

One of the interesting aspects of Frida: The Making of an Icon is that it isn’t simply a conventional exhibition of Frida Kahlo paintings.

The exhibition is concerned with the making of Frida Kahlo as an icon, so alongside Kahlo’s own works there are photographs, archival material and works by other artists who have been influenced by her.

That distinction is important.

There is the Frida Kahlo who created paintings and drawings from her intensely personal experiences, and there is the global cultural phenomenon that subsequently developed around her image.

At times, this creates an unusual viewing experience. The major Kahlo paintings attract large groups of visitors, while surrounding works by other artists explore the continuing influence of her image, ideas and visual language.

In some respects, the exhibition therefore becomes as much about “Fridamania” as it is about Frida herself.

And that is, of course, part of the story Tate is trying to tell.

Seeing Frida Kahlo Beyond the Icon

What I found most rewarding was the opportunity to see some of Kahlo’s sketches, diary drawings and notebooks.

These works offer a very different experience from the instantly recognisable self-portraits.

Kahlo’s public image can sometimes overshadow the reality of her life. Her colourful clothing, elaborate hairstyles and strong visual identity have become almost universally recognisable. Yet behind that image was a woman living with extraordinary levels of physical pain and disability.

Kahlo contracted polio as a child, which affected her mobility. At eighteen, she was involved in a devastating bus accident that caused lifelong injuries and chronic health problems.

Her body became one of the central subjects of her art.

Rather than hiding illness and disability, Kahlo repeatedly incorporated them into her paintings and drawings.

Las Apparencies / Appearances Can Be Deceiving

One of the works that particularly stayed with me was Las Apparencies / Appearances Can Be Deceiving, an intricate drawing from Kahlo’s diary.

Created around a year before her death, the work is a striking examination of the body.

Her right leg is represented in a distorted, almost anamorphic form. It appears strangely enlarged and detached from the expected proportions of the human body.

The drawing can be considered in relation to Kahlo’s lifelong experience of physical disability, beginning with polio during childhood and continuing through the injuries she suffered in the bus accident.

The symbolism becomes increasingly poignant when considered alongside the final years of her life. Kahlo’s right leg eventually had to be amputated, only a year before her death.

The drawing therefore becomes more than a depiction of physical difference. It becomes an intensely personal meditation on the body, illness, identity and mortality.

The symbolism of the drawing

Several details caught my attention.

The wings can be interpreted as suggesting an awareness of mortality or the possibility of an afterlife. A dove is also present, carrying personal significance because of Kahlo’s connection to the nickname used for her by her mother.

The surgical brace and waist strap refer to the medical equipment that formed part of Kahlo’s life following her injuries.

Her diaries are particularly revealing because they combine drawings, poems, observations and emotional reflections. They allow us to see an artist thinking directly through her body and her experiences.

This is perhaps one of the most valuable aspects of the exhibition: seeing Frida Kahlo not simply as an icon, but as a person living with pain.

Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940

One of the exhibition’s most memorable works is Autorretrato con collar de espinas y colibrí, or Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, painted in 1940.

This is classic Frida Kahlo.

She looks directly towards the viewer, surrounded by lush green foliage, animals and symbolic objects.

Her distinctive hairstyle is immediately recognisable, but so too are the features that challenge conventional ideas of feminine beauty. Kahlo does not disguise her facial hair or her striking continuous eyebrows. She presents herself on her own terms.

The thorn necklace is particularly powerful.

The thorns pierce her neck, drawing blood and creating an obvious visual metaphor for suffering. The imagery has been associated with the Christian crown of thorns, linking Kahlo’s personal pain to a much broader visual history of sacrifice.

Then there is the hummingbird.

The bird is dead and hangs from the necklace, creating an unsettling contrast with the ideas of love, luck and rebirth associated with hummingbird imagery in Mexican and Indigenous cultural traditions.

The painting is full of this kind of contradiction: beauty and pain, life and death, nature and suffering.

Kahlo, animals and the natural world

Kahlo’s love of animals is also evident.

A monkey appears beside her, interacting with the thorn necklace, while a black cat lurks nearby with a more threatening presence.

Butterflies and dragonflies add another layer of symbolism, suggesting transformation and renewal.

These elements help create the dense visual language for which Kahlo is famous. Nothing appears to be included simply for decoration.

The natural world becomes part of her psychological landscape.

Frida Kahlo and the Self-Portrait

Kahlo painted approximately 55 self-portraits during her lifetime.

Self-portraiture became one of the principal ways in which she explored identity.

Her paintings address subjects including:

• physical pain and disability
• relationships and divorce
• sexuality and femininity
• Mexican identity
• motherhood
• mortality
• love and loss
• personal resilience
• the relationship between the body and the mind

Her self-portraits are therefore much more than representations of what she looked like.

They are visual statements about who she was.

The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, 1939

Another particularly striking work is The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, painted in 1939.

It is an extraordinarily direct and unsettling depiction of the death of American actress Dorothy Hale.

Hale is shown falling from the balcony of the Hampshire House apartment building in New York. Below, her body lies on the bloodied pavement.

The work was commissioned by Hale’s friend, who wanted a portrait to give to Hale’s grieving mother. Instead of creating the conventional portrait that had been expected, Kahlo produced a graphic account of Hale’s death.

The result was so shocking that the person who commissioned it reportedly considered destroying the work.

The painting is unusual in the way it combines portraiture, narrative and tragedy. Kahlo doesn’t simply show us Dorothy Hale’s face; she tells the story of what happened to her.

The story behind Dorothy Hale

Hale had suffered a series of personal and financial difficulties. Her husband had died in a car accident, her acting career was declining and she was experiencing financial problems.

She died by suicide wearing a black dress decorated with small yellow roses.

Kahlo herself was experiencing considerable emotional upheaval when she painted the work, including her divorce from Diego Rivera.

That personal context adds another dimension to the painting.

It is difficult not to consider whether Kahlo’s own experiences with emotional suffering, loss and thoughts surrounding mortality informed the intensity of the work.

Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Archival Footage

The exhibition also provides opportunities to encounter historical material associated with Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

Seeing old footage of the couple adds an entirely different dimension to the paintings.

Photographs and moving images remind us that Kahlo wasn’t simply a figure from art history. She was a living person, photographed, filmed and documented during a period of extraordinary cultural and political change.

This archival material helps bridge the gap between the iconic Frida we recognise today and the woman who actually lived.

The Frida Kahlo Icon

Perhaps the most interesting question raised by the exhibition is: How did Frida Kahlo become Frida Kahlo?

Her image has become almost inseparable from her art.

Today, Kahlo’s face appears on everything from posters and books to fashion, merchandise and popular culture. Her distinctive eyebrows, flowers and traditional Mexican clothing have become symbols in their own right.

But the exhibition asks us to look beyond that surface.

The title The Making of an Icon is therefore particularly appropriate.

It encourages visitors to think about the difference between:

Frida Kahlo the artist

and

Frida Kahlo the cultural phenomenon.

The two are now almost impossible to separate.

A Note for Visitors: Book Your Tickets

My experience provides one very practical lesson: book ahead.

The exhibition is popular, and arriving at Tate Modern without a pre-booked timed ticket can mean a significant wait.

The exhibition is currently scheduled to run until 3 January 2027, giving visitors plenty of opportunities to plan a visit. Tate’s current exhibition information confirms the run dates and describes the show as a major examination of Kahlo’s transformation into a global icon.

Final Thoughts: Is Frida: The Making of an Icon Worth Seeing?

Yes – particularly if you want to understand more than the familiar Frida Kahlo image.

The exhibition is busy, and the crowds around the major paintings can make viewing difficult. I was also disappointed that The Two Fridas was not among the works I was able to see.

Nevertheless, the opportunity to encounter Kahlo’s paintings alongside her drawings, diaries, photographs, archival material and the work of artists influenced by her makes this an interesting and ambitious exhibition.

For me, the most memorable part wasn’t necessarily seeing the most famous painting.

It was seeing the quieter, more intimate material – the diary drawings and sketches that reveal the physical and emotional reality behind the public image.

Frida Kahlo’s art remains powerful because it is so deeply personal. Her body became her subject, her pain became part of her visual vocabulary, and her private experiences became something that could communicate with audiences across generations.

More than seventy years after her death, she remains one of the most recognisable artists in the world.

But perhaps the most important thing this exhibition reminds us is that before Frida became an icon, she was an artist – and before she became an artist, she was a woman trying to make sense of her own extraordinary life.

Frida Kahlo Exhibition at Tate Modern – Quick Facts

Detail	Information
Exhibition	Frida: The Making of an Icon
Artist	Frida Kahlo
Venue	Tate Modern, London
Location	Level 3, Natalie Bell Building
Opening date	25 June 2026
Closing date	3 January 2027
Focus	Kahlo’s transformation into a global cultural icon
Visitor tip	Book a timed ticket in advance

Tate’s current listings confirm that Frida: The Making of an Icon is booking through January 2027.

This article contains affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase — at no extra cost to you.