About to cross Libertador Avenue from Callao and while we wait for the traffic light to clear us, we look down and what we find there, graffiti on the pedestrian path like a stencil of the mysterious Banksy – and then we will see it on the sidewalks in the vicinity of the Faculty of Law–, is a graffiti alluding to the exhibition that opens in full swing this Friday, January 20 and runs until the end of April: we are talking about the
Life and Work of Frida Kahlo
,
the exhibition that pays tribute to the Mexican painter through more than a hundred plastic, literary and photographic works.
We went to
the Buenos Aires Convention Center
, which is located at Figueroa Alcorta 2099, a few meters from Plaza Francia and the Museum of Fine Arts.
Hours before what promises to be “the immersive experience of the year” – as announced by the white graffiti on the streets – the one who tours the different rooms together with
Clarín Cultura
is
Carla Prat, artistic director of the project.
She came especially from Spain for this set-up and there she is with a big smile telling us, indeed, about the life and work of the great artist with the bushy eyebrows.
Although it is still being assembled, a large part of a hybrid exhibition can already be glimpsed, which more than an exhibition is
an audiovisual spectacle with a bit of cinema –projections, music– and a similar amount of art.
Entrance to the immersive experience.
Photo Maxi Failla
What Prat is interested in highlighting is
the positive aspect of Frida Kahlo,
her success, her intelligence, her role in society: "She is often remembered for her tragic side, the one who had an accident, the one who could not be a mother , which was deceived.
Here we are looking for a reinterpretation of everything she could do.
There is an optimistic message, of resilience, of 'live life' despite everything”.
It will have to be said, then, that in this “experience” – as these artistic proposals are usually defined in recent times (Van Gogh and Banksy had their experiences last year in La Rural) – the life of
Frida Kahlo
(1907 ) is not narrated
-1954) chronologically, from his birth to his death.
Instead, the narrative that spins the tour is based, above all, on her intimate diary.
Published for the first time in 1995 and kept under lock and key in the Casa Azul for four decades,
Frida's diary recounts the last ten years of her life, from 1944 to 1954.
There she reveals traits of her personality, her thoughts, and His drawings (watercolours, self-portraits and sketches that he would later translate into his paintings), his poems, dreams and creative process are reflected.
She also reveals the stormy relationship with the muralist
Diego Rivera,
her husband.
The muralist Diego Rivera, with whom Frida Kahlo had a turbulent relationship.
Photo Maxi Failla
The immersive audiovisual offers an artistic reinterpretation of Frida's work and
is divided into three major narrative moments.
The first part shows
the artist in all her splendor,
creating a parallelism between her work and testimonies from her contemporaries with the idea of transmitting the relevance of this painter in the intellectual and artistic environment of her time. .
The second part introduces
his most intimate facet,
introduces the family, alludes to his roots and friendships and delves into a key event in his history,
the traumatic accident on September 17, 1927 when the bus in which he was traveling was hit by a tram that made her reborn as a painter, after undergoing 32 surgeries.
The third part recreates
the Casa Azul, the home where Frida Kahlo was born, lived, painted and died.
To recreate environments and contextualize events, illustrations were created that mix photos, drawings and collages, in a symbolic and surreal artistic reinterpretation of her creative universe.
The exhibition is based on Frida Kahlo's intimate diary.
Photo Maxi Failla
the tour
The first room will be, thus, the one that
exhibits pages from Frida's diary,
which, at that time, can be bought in the souvenir shop at the end of the tour: “It is not a traditional intimate diary in the manner of 'Dear Diary', rather it is more of a 'sketchbook' or notebook of sketches and ideas, which she never thought of publishing.
It is very honest and it is the basis of the sample”, says Prat.
Then we cross
the first color threshold, yellow,
defined here as "madness, sickness, fear, part of the sun, and joy."
A mirror reflects us.
At her side, words fly that define
Frida Kahlo
, a room with a poetic tinge, one would say: dancer, communist, free ("What do I want feet for if I have wings to fly", she has said), revolutionary, intelligent, painter , painful, poet, malinche, Tehuana.
It is a room that also
focuses on his origins
: his Oaxacan mother, his German father and then his relationship with Rivera, with whom he forms an elite artistic pairing.
“I suffered two serious accidents in my life, one in which a bus knocked me to the ground… The other accident is Diego”, Frida Kahlo once said.
Photo Maxi Failla
The second threshold is red, "blood, well who knows"
.
So.
Said by the suspicious Frida herself, two accidents marked her life on fire: "I suffered two serious accidents in my life, one in which a bus knocked me to the ground... The other accident is Diego."
Frida begins to paint in bed
–a gigantography shows her barely upright in bed with a brush and drawing–, she becomes a painter, she invents herself beyond pain.
This photo is also part of the
Tercer ojo
exhibition , which will continue throughout this year at Malba, and whose outstanding work is the painting
Diego y yo
.
She paints small, delicate and allegorical paintings, in contrast to
Rivera's gigantic murals.
But, here, in the Convention Center, there will be a structure that will emulate that situation – a kind of deconstructed bed, another mirror, the reflection of
Frida
– and that the visitor will be able to experience: sit, lie down, pretend
to be Frida for a while
. for a while and
pretend to paint a great work of art.
The replicas of the best-known paintings hang from transparent fabrics.
Photo Maxi Failla
The replicas of the best-known paintings by the artist born in 1907 –although she will say that it was in 1910 with the Mexican Revolution and thus make her birth a performative act– hang from transparent, ethereal fabrics: Frida as a man, the two Fridas, Anthropomorphic Frida (The wounded deer), Frida with Diego as the third eye, Frida with a parrot and orangutan.
Frida, Frida, Frida and more Fridas.
There remains, just before the
highlight of this tour, a passage through the
blue
threshold ,
“electricity, purity, love”,
the color that names Kahlo's house in Coyoacán.
There you can see a brief color fragment of a video of Frida with Diego.
Make an impact.
So far, all this is, one could say, a warm
up to the world of Frida and her path to becoming an icon of modern art in Latin America.
The highlight of the expo remains and it has to do with the huge immersive room in the style of the one she set up with Van Gogh in La Rural
with a 360-degree videomapping projection on walls and floor.
The highlight of the expo has to do with the huge immersive room and the 40-minute videomapping.
Photo Maxi Failla
This audiovisual lasts
40 minutes
and is projected in a loop to infinity.
In addition, the (fictitious) voice of Frida is heard (based on the reading of the newspaper by two Mexican actresses) and that of other characters such as Pablo Picasso, León Trotsky and Diego Rivera (voices recreated by actors).
Through 2,500 animated and hand-painted frames by various artists, masterpieces such as
The Suicide of Dorothy Hale
,
What the Water Gave Me
or the self-portrait dedicated to Doctor Eloesser are brought to life.
In the center of the room, which will have seats for visitors, stands as a surprise
a kind of altar with candles and flowers
and horns (because of the wounded deer) and pharmacy bottles and even an urn (fictitious, of course) with his ashes. , all objects that refer to it.
In the center of the room, which will have seats for visitors, stands as a surprise a kind of altar with candles and flowers.
Photo Maxi Failla
The music
that accompanies the entire tour does not sound for nothing.
An original soundtrack was created for this exhibition by the composer and pianist
Arturo Cardelús.
In the musical composition, cinematographic techniques have been used with the pure intention of establishing “emotional rhythms” –it increases the tension and explodes, for example, in everything related to the turbulent relationship with Rivera– and “enhancing the visual narrative”.
To achieve this, a wide variety of instruments and sound effects were used, combined with traditional European and Mexican music, which refer to the origins of the artist.
The soundtrack was recorded with the Budapest Art Orchestra, led by its conductor, Peter Pejtsik.
As a corollary to the tour, there will be a souvenir shop (to buy, why not,
El Diario de Frida Kahlo
) and a drawing space for the little ones.
There, too, as if to give a greater context, there will be a timeline on the life of the artist who died in 1954, at the age of 47: "When I die, burn my body. I don't want to be buried. I've spent a lot of time lying down! burn it!" was one of his last expressions of desire.
Life and Work of Frida Kahlo,
the only immersive exhibition authorized to reproduce the artist's pictorial work in Argentine territory, was created in collaboration with the trust that
Diego Rivera founded before his death to preserve his wife's work
, as well as with archives of institutions such as the Malba, the Museo Casa Frida Kahlo and the San Francisco Museum of Art, after a long investigation led by Roxana Velásquez, executive director of the San Diego Museum of Art, and Deidré Guevara, curator of the exhibition
Frida y I
at the Georges Pompidou Museum in Paris.
The exhibition, a production of Move Concert and Ozono Producciones, created by Acciona Cultura, comes to Argentina after the success in Madrid, where it was premiered last year: it received more than 100,000 visitors.
Here, the tickets for the first days are already sold out.
File
Life and work of Frida Kahlo
Where:
Exhibition Center, Avenida Figueroa Alcorta 2099.
When:
Tuesday and Wednesday from 4 to 9 pm;
from Thursday to Sunday, from 2:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Admission:
from $3,400, here.
pc
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