Madonna collects her. Her work sets auction records for women artists. Netflix is developing a series about her. She’s the subject of an opera.
Now, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo has another claim to fame. “Frida: The Making of an Icon,” opening this month at London’s Tate Modern, has pre-sold 41,000 tickets, a record for the institution, reports the Guardian. That beats the 32,000 advance sales for the museum’s 2017 David Hockney exhibition.
“We’re pretty blown away by it,” Catherine Wood, Tate Modern’s interim director, told the publication.
The museum is billing the show as the first major exhibition to explore how Kahlo became a “global icon” and a major influence on a generation of artists. Co-organized with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the show will include more than 30 works by the artist alongside documentary photographs, personal effects, and works by a host of artists reflecting her profound influence.
Frida Kahlo, Untitled (Self-portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird), 1940.
Courtesy Tate Modern.
Highlights will include a selection of Kahlo’s most iconic self-portraits, including 1926’s Self-Portrait (With Velvet Dress) and Self-Portrait with Loose Hair (1938), through which, says Tate, “she embraced her Mexican heritage, queer self-image, feminist ideals, and experience as a disabled woman.” Artist Diego Rivera—her husband, one of the great Mexican muralists and a global icon himself—will also appear, with works like his ca. 1935 portrait of Kahlo.
Though the artist resisted being labeled a Surrealist, the artists of that group embraced her, with the movement’s founder, André Breton, dubbing her “a self-made Surrealist.” New York’s Julien Levy Gallery, a major supporter of the movement in the States, gave her a solo show in 1938, after which Breton invited her to show in Paris; the state acquired her 1938 self-portrait The Frame, which will go on view along with works like Diego and Frida (1929), Survivor (1938), Memory (The Heart), from 1937, and Girl with a Death Mask (1938).
Yasumasa Morimura, An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Hand Shaped Earring), 2001.
© Yasumasa Morimura; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Yoshiko Isshiki Office, Tokyo
Other Latin American artists identified with the Surrealists, including Kati Horna and Leonor Fini, will also appear in the show, which will explore their preoccupation with imagery informed by the movement, such as death, dreaming, masks, and skeletons.
After Kahlo’s death in 1954, the US Chicano movement took her up as a symbol in the 1960s, and in the 1980s and ’90s, Mexican artists such as Nahúm B. Zenil and Georgina Quintana, also inspired by Kahlo, created work that critically repurposed quintessential Mexican imagery and popular traditions. Her global reach is reflected in the work of artists such as Judy Chicago, Ana Mendieta, Yasumasa Morimura, and Kiki Smith. Hayden Herrera’s 1983 biography of the artist, now translated into more than 25 languages, further expanded her global appeal.
The show also explores “Fridamania,” or the commercialization of the artist’s work, image, and style, by which the artist is now used to promote products like tequila and perfume and even has her own Barbie doll.
That last phenomenon is not uncontroversial; the artist’s great-niece Cristina Kahlo, has called her commercialization a “double-edged sword,” saying it “in some way distorts what she really was: a great artist.”
“Frida: The Making of an Icon” will be on view at Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG, July 25, 2026–January 3, 2027.
