Quotes from Gannit Ankori

During her life she was in Rivera's shadow. She was framed as the 'Wife of the Master Mural Painter [who] Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art', as the patronizing headline of the Detroit News proclaimed in February 1933. Today, Rivera is known as Frida's husband.

The 'unsharable' nature of pain, Scarry goes on to argue, triggers a chain reaction that isolates the bearer of pain and frequently leads to a lack of compassion, alienation and often even cruelty on the part of those who are not afflicted and lack the capacity to acknowledge, let alone comprehend its existence.

Kahlo's paintings offer a visual vocabulary with which trauma and pain can be transmitted or communicated with dignity and compassion. Through the language of her innovative art Kahlo gives voice to silenced, unresolved traumata. She thus obliterates the barrier between the individual experiencing pain and the viewer, and evokes empathy for our shared human fragility.

Kahlo's imaginative configurations of alternative selves and hybrid cosmologies transcend the genre of self-portraiture. They conjure up bold political, spiritual and ontological queries and open up radically new discursive realms.

Unlike Rivera and the other muralists, who painted a monolithic hegemonic national narrative, Kahlo visually articulated a multidimensional Mexican past.

Judith Ferreto, Kahlo's nurse and long-time care-giver, recalled that the last time she saw the artist, just days before her death, the artist declared: 'Love is the only reason for living.

Her physical and emotional experiences, which thwarted these ambitions, were powerful but not unique. Many people suffer from illness, accidents, a bad marriage and divorce. It was Kahlo's responses to the experiences of her life, rather than the experiences themselves, combined with her rare talent for articulating them visually and giving meaning to them that distinguish Kahlo as a towering cultural figure.

The essential in Frida is a sick woman, intelligent, with a great passion for life beyond her sickness.

To overcome the emotional hardships of being ridiculed for being different, she turned difference into specialness and transformed her disability into a defining quality of her identity.

she projects her own disability onto inanimate objects, painting clay idols, tables and various other artefacts with broken feet or wounded legs.

Kahlo's paintings offer a visual vocabulary with which trauma and pain can be transmitted or communicated with dignity and compassion.

for Kahlo, painting was a way of coping with being alone. That is, she painted herself as a second self, or 'imaginary companion', because she was so often emotionally alone.

It was Kahlo's responses to the experiences of her life, rather than the experiences themselves, combined with her rare talent for articulating them visually and giving meaning to them that distinguish Kahlo as a towering cultural figure.

I do not like to influence others. I would not like to become famous. I have done nothing deserving of acknowledgment in my life.2 When Kahlo made this statement she had already produced virtually all the iconic paintings for which she is well known – indeed, venerated – today.

The chasm that separates our contemporary admiration and high regard for Kahlo and her achievements from the artist's own scathing self-denigration is but one of numerous gaps and contradictions that riddle the story – indeed stories – of Frida Kahlo.

From 1926 until her death she would continue to paint and draw numerous self-portraits, bestowing them as binding gifts to her husband, Diego Rivera, and to friends, lovers and admirers, beseeching them to remember her, always.

Kahlo signed several letters as 'La Malinche' and referenced her repeatedly through her imagery, thus cementing her identification with the Chingada-Malinche. In doing so she rehabilitated the most despised and misunderstood character of Mexican history and exposed the misogynist forces that maligned her and continued to oppress her daughters during Kahlo's lifetime.

In one of her diary entries she wrote: 'I am a bird.'8 The artist – first as a crippled child, later as a bedridden adult – clearly craved the ultimate freedom of motion epitomized by flight. Kahlo's imaginary companion – an alternate Self – could dance in a way that defied gravity, like a weightless entity.

Her letters from this period and her later accounts of the events reveal that following the accident she felt virtually abandoned.

I paint myself because I am so often alone', Kahlo said.24 This statement is usually interpreted as the artist's explanation for using her own face as the model for her paintings. The statement, however, may be read in a different way, implying that, for Kahlo, painting was a way of coping with being alone. That is, she painted herself as a second self, or 'imaginary companion', because she was so often emotionally alone.

Kahlo's own words convinced even a most critical scholar that, in the case of Kahlo, the boundary between art and life was either fluid or non-existent:

The public persona that Kahlo presented in interviews and in her meticulously staged photographic portraits is substantially different from 'the many Fridas' we encounter when reading her private letters, carefully studying her diary or analysing the profound and complex art she created. Contradictions abound.

Looking back at her – eye to eye – she offers release into a fantasy world of flight, laughter and order. Kahlo's memory, then, was of a metaphoric inward voyage, through which she found an alternative self.

Kahlo associated this formative experience of seeing her 'second self' on the window-pane of her bedroom with her adult activity as an artist, whose self-portraits also functioned as metaphoric windows, mirrors and liminal spaces of the imagination.