Most of her work comes from her experiences of being in a serious accident which changed her body and her life. She paints out of that, although she was painting before too.
Lots of the stuff in her paintings seems to play on dualisms - sun & moon, light & dark, male-female stereotypes but what interests me are the ways in which her paintings seem so accessible for others. She painted out herself and her emotions and thoughts. She was political and passionate living as she did for much of her life with Diego Rivera and his wandering ways.
That phrase "she lived dying" is interesting to me. A friend said it of her. Frida lived a lot in the knowledge in her body and memory of near-death. She also lived with the consequences of death in her life forever after.
Andre Breton said
"Fecundity is linked to death in fruits of the earth."(1938) and this makes me think about the way in which creativity which is unbounded in imagination can be outworked in a limited way physically. There are many resonances of this in other places. Life, death and creativity splling over into each other - affecting and altering each other. Within this context of living-dying through and in the body there are so many connections to feminist work around embodiment. Sallie McFague's work on the earth as the body of god is particularly helpful for example. But the themes which arise in Frida's paintings of fruits are part of her expression of identity with Mexico and her roots pre-colonialism.
Frida's paintings hold and spill over with cosmic themes - the embrace of earth and body as sacred, embracing herself as within the cosmic life of the universe, political passion, bodily experience as a way of knowing and therefore its epistemological overtones. These seem to me to be part of the appeal of Frida's painting and of our want to know her more. Yes, she's become a cult figure but her paintings encomass so much more of the deep things of life-death that she liberates us as she articulates them on the canvass.
Go and see the paintings soon...the happening ends on Oct 9th! http://www.tate.org.uk
