Frida Kahlo: In Her Own Image — Bendigo Art Gallery

I made the journey to Bendigo, landing at the Art Gallery on the very last day of Frida Kahlo: In Her Own Image and it was nothing short of profound. This wasn’t just an exhibition; it was an intimate invitation into Frida’s world. A rare chance to stand among the fragments of her life, her clothes, her photographs, her relics brought directly from Mexico’s Museo Frida Kahlo. And in that space, you didn’t just observe her story, you felt it move through you.

Source: Bendigo Art Gallery

Born in 1907 in Mexico City’s Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo was never meant to live a quiet life. Even as a child, illness marked her path, polio left her with a limp and a resilience far beyond her years. But it was a devastating bus accident at age 18 that would fracture her spine and change the course of everything that came after.

Bedridden and broken, she began to paint not to pass the time, but to survive it. And from that bed, she started building the world’s most unflinching self-portrait, one piece at a time.

In 1922, she enrolled at Mexico’s National Preparatory School, one of just a handful of women. There, she met Diego Rivera, first as a muralist she admired, and years later as the man she would marry, leave, and marry again. Their relationship was tempestuous, layered with passion, betrayal, and art that bled across each other's canvases.

In 1930, she followed Rivera to the U.S., where her art evolved—steeped now in miscarriage, medical trauma, and political disillusionment. While Rivera painted walls, Frida painted wounds, her own, and the ones society refused to see.

By 1938, her work caught the eye of André Breton, leader of the Surrealists, who called her art a ribbon around a bomb. That same year, she held her first solo exhibition in New York. One year later, she travelled to Paris, met Picasso, and had her work exhibited beside the greats. But even then, she remained grounded in her own reality. “I never painted dreams,” she said. “I painted my own reality.”

Throughout the 1940s, her paintings—The Two Fridas, Henry Ford Hospital, The Broken Column—became darker, more intricate, more exacting. She used her own image not to glorify, but to confront. Her spine was crumbling, her leg eventually amputated, her pain constant, but she kept painting. Kept speaking. Kept dressing herself in layers of colour and culture, even when her world dimmed.

In 1953, despite being gravely ill, Frida arrived at her first solo exhibition in Mexico lying on a bed, lifted by ambulance and surrounded by flowers. She greeted her audience as if she were still standing because in every way that mattered, she was.

She died in 1954, just days after her 47th birthday. Officially, the cause was a pulmonary embolism. Unofficially, some believe it was her final act of autonomy. In death, she became a myth. However, in the 1970s, feminists reclaimed her as a symbol of resistance. In 1983, her story was told anew in Frida: A Biography by Hayden Herrera. And in 2002, she returned to the screen, portrayed by Salma Hayek in a film that earned global acclaim. But no film, no book, no myth can ever fully hold her.

Frida Kahlo didn’t just paint—she revealed. Her life was not easy, and she never pretended otherwise. She turned agony into art. Grief into colour. Silence into revolution. And in doing so, she gave generations of women, survivors, artists, and rebels permission to do the same.

From the moment you step into the exhibition, the world shifts. You’re pulled into Frida’s orbit, her mark on life through her photography, family, art, clothing, jewellery, sketches, handwritten traces and yes, even her medical corsets, relics of the pain she carried like a shadow.

One of the most striking moments for me was standing in front of her Tehuana dresses, layers of colour and history stitched into fabric with unmistakable intention. These weren’t just garments. They were statements. Shields. A reclamation of identity. This exhibition made it clear, Frida didn’t just create art. She crafted herself. Every thread, every bead, every stroke was a conscious act of power.

There was something intimate, almost haunting about passing by the imagery of her family, the inspiration for her most iconic self-portraits. And then came the medical relics: trays of pills, faded prosthetics, the everyday tools of her survival. These weren’t props. They were her constants. Her quiet, unyielding companions. And seeing them displayed so plainly without myth or filter hit me deeper than any painting ever could.

Frida Kahlo was a fearless architect of self-image, using portraiture not just to paint her face, but to lay bare her inner world, her soul. Draped in vivid colour and layered with potent symbolism, her canvases turned personal pain into myth, and identity into resistance. It’s this raw, uncompromising vision that has captivated audiences across generations and continents. Her self-portraits weren’t mere reflections, they were reckonings. Through them, she confronted her own history: the political unrest that shaped her, the betrayals that broke her, the chronic pain that never left her. But her gaze didn’t stop at the personal. Frida painted the feminine psyche, colonial violence, ancestral memory, and the fragile birth of Mexican nationhood. She held a mirror to herself and to the world.

This exhibition doesn’t just display objects, it weaves them into story. Every piece is framed with care, revealing how Frida used clothing and adornment not as decoration, but as deliberate acts of cultural, political, and personal defiance. Her wardrobe wasn’t just fabric, it was armour, language, identity. The digital displays and audio guides felt like whispers from the past Frida’s thoughts on indigeneity, womanhood, and postcolonial resistance echoing through the very items she wore. Even the exhibition catalogue, rich and beautifully crafted, had me pausing between pages, breath caught in the gravity of it all.

Yes, it was busy. Yes, it was emotionally heavy. After a few hours, I felt both drained and deeply moved. But you know what? That’s exactly the point. Frida wasn’t easy; she refused to be sanitised. Her life was intense and layered with beauty, pain, creativity, and politics. This exhibition does not shy away from that richness. It demands engagement. This is layered storytelling. Indigenous Mexican dress. Feminist politics. Postcolonial identity. Chronic illness. All interwoven, all spotlit.

 As I walked through, taking in all I could, it felt like recognition. Not in the details of her life, but in the way she held it all. The pain. The defiance. The need to make sense of the chaos by turning it into something beautiful. Frida didn’t separate her story from her art, and I’ve never been able to separate mine from my art and voice.

She carried so much grief, betrayal, physical pain and still insisted on expressing all of it, honestly, without apology. I understand that. The way trauma reshapes you. The way truth-telling becomes survival.

Like Frida, I’ve lived through the unraveling. I’ve carried what others dismissed. I’ve been dismissed, not because my story wasn’t real, but because it made people uncomfortable. And like her, I’ve kept speaking anyway.

Standing in that gallery, surrounded by pieces of her life, I didn’t feel like I was looking at an icon. I felt like I was standing beside someone who would understand.

Walk with me

Frida Kahlo: In Her Own Image isn’t a retrospective, it’s a reckoning. It doesn’t just show you who she was, it immerses you in how she moved through the world, how she sculpted her own mythology with fabric, metal, paint, and pain. She didn’t just create art, she was the art. Her body, her politics, her defiance, every part of her was a canvas, a confrontation, a call to feel more deeply.

If you’ve ever stood in front of one of her portraits and felt the sting of truth this exhibition brings it closer. Closer than skin. And if you’re just meeting her for the first time? Prepare to be undone and rebuilt by the fire she left behind.