Frida. Viva la vida!

Frida Kahlo's life and work have been inspiring the world for decades. Among artists, she was a champion for overcoming personal tragedies and disappointments. Frida's story is "two big accidents: one when the bus hit the streetcar, the other when Diego Rivera hit it," 33 surgeries and 145 paintings. 
Most of her work is self-portraits. "Sometimes I ask myself, weren't my paintings more works of literature than paintings? They were a kind of diary, a correspondence that I kept all my life. I was deprived of three children and much else to fill my nightmarish life. My art is the most complete biography I could write," Frida confessed in her diary.  

The artist used her talent to portray her own experiences, facing challenges that would probably have broken someone less resilient. Her paintings, full of symbols and allegories, rooted deep in Mexican tradition, mythology, and Buddhism, mainly draw the viewer's attention to the artist's physical condition and to her relationship with her husband Diego, rich in infidelity and breakups. Frida's work - in form reminiscent of naive art with hints of surrealism - has become the embodiment of Mexican folk art, fashion and women's freedom, with the result that the artist has been made an icon of feminism. 
At the exhibition "Frida. Viva la vida!" viewers will see a magnificent and dynamic multimedia performance - paintings of the artist coming to life accompanied by a very frank first-person account of her life's peripeteia. The voice-over narration is read by Marianne Schultz, the actress who understudied Salma Hayek in "Frida".