Frida and I

By Odile Fayet, Isabelle Frantz-Marty, Educational action and programme department for young people

In collaboration with Déidré Guevara, Instituto Guerrerense de la Cultura

A space for discovering the world of Frida Kahlo, this exhibition-workshop invites children aged 5 to 10 and their families on a journey though Frida's life and work.

One of the most famous painters of the 20th century and an iconic figure in modern Mexican art, she produced work that closely reflected her life, drawing her subjects from not only her country, her family and her love for the painter Diego Rivera but also from her physical suffering, which isolated her and which she overcame to regain her freedom and become an artist. As she wrote in her Diary, 'I paint myself because I am so often alone, and I am the subject I know best,' and 'I paint my reality. I know only one thing: painting is a real need for me.'

Through her work and self-portraits, children are invited to think about the ideas of identity and culture. The staging of this exhibition-workshop offers a contemporary reinterpretation of the artist's sources of inspiration: the mother goddess, masks of ancestors, idols, commemorative plaques, colours, and so on. Casa Azul, the artist's childhood home, is a guiding theme and a window opening onto Frida's story and the wonderful, colourful world of Mexico. This lively environment full of luxuriant flowers and peopled with monkeys, parrots and dogs, daily objects and memories of the Pre-Columbian culture, became a basic motif in her work. She painted over a hundred self-portraits during her life, characterised by her famous eyebrows in the shape of a V. This sign forcefully asserts her unique position as a woman artist who claimed her liberty in a world dominated by men.
In 1939, André Breton invited her to Paris, where Frida met the Surrealist artists and achieved great success with the critics, confirmed by the Musée du Louvre 's purchase of The Frame, now at the Centre Pompidou.

In a poetic circuit that can be followed in any order, various interactive, fun set-ups place children in hands-on situations as they create, seek and observe – while discovering the world of this artist painter through themes they can relate to, like 'my family and I', self-portraits, nature, pain, travel and so on.
Reproductions of works, photographs, films, documents and a range of quotations foster an understanding of Frida's work and times. This exhibition-workshop is being presented in the Centre Pompidou Galerie des Enfants during the new exhibition of the collections entitled 'Modernités plurielles', which devotes a large section to Latin American art. It then goes to Acapulco in November 2013 for the inauguration of a new cultural venue: the Casa de los Vientos, with its murals by Diego Rivera, as the crowning touch to a partnership between the two cultural institutions.