Frida Kahlo

During her final years, Frida painted mostly still life but would politicize them by adding a flag, a peace dove, or inscriptions. One of her last self portraits in 1954 was ‘ Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick’, this was a strong political statement in support of the PCM. After this painting she immortalized Stalin in ‘ Self Portrait with Stalin’ which also has an obvious Communist theme.

In 1938, French poet and Surrealist Andre Breton immediately labelled Frida as an innate ‘Surrealist’, until Breton arrival, people who saw Kahlo’s paintings saw just what she wanted the to see, painted images on the surface. However Breton saw beyond that as he saw the images as a surrealistic masquerade of her own pain and emotions. Although Frida created works that were considered by others to be ‘Surreal’, she did not consider them to be ‘Surreal’ nor did she follow the accepted conventions of the ‘Surrealism’ movement. She simply used her own style of surrealistic elements to paint her own reality, Frida once wrote “ I really don’t know if my paintings are Surrealistic or not, but I do know that they are the most honest expression of myself, never taking into consideration the judgements or prejudiced of anyone.”

Frida never considered herself to be a ‘Surrealist’ and rejected that label. “They thought I was a ‘Surrealist’, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams I painted my own reality.” Kahlo’s own Surrealistic style was derived from her obsession with death and her culture. Although she did not consider herself a true ‘Surrealist’, in 1940, Frida participated in the International Exhibition of Surrealism. She exhibited the two largest paintings of her career which were both labelled by people as ‘Surreal’: ‘The Two Fridas’ and ‘The Wounded Table’.

Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick

 Self Portrait with Stalin

 The Two Fridas

 The Wounded Table

Personally I think that Frida's work are slightly linked to the Surrealist movement. I think this because, as she uses herself in her paintings, in each one there are a different story behind it. However, each painting looks like a dream and imagination more than it looks like reality. Using her pain and own emotions in her paintings they give off that imaginative feel as if she has dreamt it and then paints it thinking its her own reality.

Final piece

For my final piece I recreated Frida Kahlo. I think her relates to my work as I usually look towards floral objects and base my work around a floral theme and if not floral then it will be most probably related to a natural and nature theme.

For my recreation I did a couple of different ideas. For my first idea I thought of doing it natural and also used the snapchat filter, the one with the flower headband.

Then I did a couple others but with make up on, on one I used the snapchat filter again but on the other one I used a flower headband I had bought and slightly crafted by putting more flowers onto it. For my final piece I stayed natural with no makeup, but decided to use the snapchat filter as it showed me modernising the image a bit more by using new technology.

Frida Kahlo

For our final piece we have to choose a picture and recreate and modernise it. For my final piece I have chosen Frida Kahlo.

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter, most known for her self portraits. Mexican culture and traditions are important in her work, which has been sometimes characterised as naive art or folk art. Her work has also been described as surrealist. Frida created at least 140 paintings along with dozens of drawings and studies. Of her paintings about 55 are self portraits which often incorporate symbolic portrays of physical and psychological wounds. 
Diego Rivera had a great influence on her paintings style and she had always admired his work. Frida was also influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, which is shown by her use of bright colours, dramatic symbolism and primitive style. She frequently included the monkey, which in Mexican mythology is a symbol of lust, Frida portrays it as tender and protective symbols. Also Christian and Jewish themes are often depicted in her work. 

The photo I have chosen is: 



I chose to look at Frida Kahlo because I like the stories and also emotions behind each painting. It’s like each painting has its own story and it shows how each different emotion can produce and be shown in each painting. I chose this image in particular because I like how it can show different emotions that may be involved in the painting. The thorn necklace shows some form of pain she might have been feeling at the time and how the thorns have drawn out blood. However, the flowers, earrings and the dress indicate that Frida was dressing up.

Kahlo preferred dressing in native Mexican costume and paid great attention to her hair and make-up even when gravely ill. The numerous self-portraits she created range in mood from violent (i.e. showing herself as a deer shot through with arrows or a woman ripped open from neck to navel and covered with nails), to heart-rending (showing herself naked and bleeding profusely from complications of childbirth), to more serene images such as the Self-Portrait with Monkey.

Kahlo's imagery reflects a preoccupation with the exploration of love and its connection to pain in her life. Her relationship with Diego Rivera inspired many of her paintings. As her biographer, Hayden Herrera, noted, "Every time Diego left her, there's another painting with tears or gashes." In Kahlo's own words, Rivera showed her "the revolutionary sense of life and the true sense of colour.

Advertisement and the power of the image in art

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This image was created, its called ' David Kirby on his deathbed, Ohio, 1990'.
David Kirby was an activist for HIV/ AIDS in the 1970's until his death in 1990. Kirby suffered from HIV and stayed in a AIDS hospice in Ohio.

David Kirby died at the age of 32 on Mat 5th, 1990.

1982 - AIDS is defined ' a disease at least moderately predictive of a defect in cell mediated immunity, occurring in a person with no known case for diminished resistance to that disease.

1983 - Discovered AIDS could be passed down genetically.
         - AIDS have affected 3,064 people ( 1,292 dead ).

1984 - Cause of AIDS discovered.

1985 - Over 20,000 cases of AIDS in the world

1989 - Approximately 100,000 reported AIDS cases

1990 - Believed that over 8-10 million people had HIV worldwide.

Poster

This poster depicts 3 Hindu women, dressed in traditional clothing, sitting on a rug. The central figure is of a young mother holding a new born baby tied closely to her body. The women are talking to one another, it can be inferred that they are talking about the possibility of a husband contracting AIDS while away from home.
The poster cautions to use protection when having sex with strangers. The central theme in this poster is male infidelity and with it an increased risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. The subject matter and title is extremely relevant to the target audience, in this instance the families in rural parts of the country, and most men tend to earn their living by going to the cities and usually stay there for a long period of time.
This theme exposes the vicious cycle of poverty. Away from their families due to lack of funds and paid vacations, these men turn to sex workers and are likely to be infected by them.
The translation of the poster says;
' My husband has gone to the city to make more money, I hope he does not contract AIDS while he is there. But if he resists temptations then he can never bring AIDS back home. Sexual intercourse without proper precautions results in the spread of AIDS.



Peter Kennard and Cat Picton- Phillips who have worked together since 2002, initially to make art in response to the invasion of Iraq. Their work is shown in a range of contexts, online, in galleries and on protest marches. They describe their work as an integral part of political activism, a direct means of communication: ' The visual arm of protest'. Photo op, depicting Tony Blair taking a selfie in front of a huge explosion, has to become an iconic image.
It was produced in response to the anger they felt at the Government's decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, in the face of widespread public protest. They describe their need to create something that reflected and validated this public opposition, sentiments they felt were not reflected in the mainstream media at the time.



On 8th June 1972, a plane bombed the village of Trang Bang, near Saigon in South Vietnam after the South Vietnamese pilot mistook a group of civilians leaving the temple for enemy troops. The bombs contained napalm, a highly flammable fuel, which killed and badly burned the people on the ground.
The iconic black and white image taken of children fleeing the scene won the Pulitzer Prize and was chosen as the World Press Photo of the year in 1972.
It communicated the horrors of the Vietnam war in a way words never could, helping to end one of the most divisive wars in American history and later becoming a symbol of the cruelty of all wars for children and civilian victims.

Art and politics

A strong relationship between the arts and politics, particularly between various kinds of art and power, occurs across historical epochs and cultures. As they respond to contemporaneous events and politics, the arts take on political as well as social dimensions, becoming themselves a focus of controversy and even a force of political as well as social change.

Epochs - A particular period of time in history or a persons life.

' Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics'. - Groys

Yinka Shonibare

Yinka Shonibare, is a British-Nigerian artist living in London. His work explores cultural identity, colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. A hallmark of his art is the brightly coloured Dutch wax fabric he uses.
Shonibare’s work explores issues of colonialism alongside those of race and class, through a range of media which include painting, sculpture, photography, installation art, and, more recently, film and performance. He examines, in particular, the construction of identity and tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories.



Ai WeiWei

 Ai Weiwei is a Chinese Contemporary artist and activist.  Ai collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron as the artistic consultant on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics. As a political activist, he has been highly and openly critical of the Chinese Government's stance on democracy and human rights. He has investigated government corruption and cover-ups, in particular the Sichuan schools corruption scandal following the collapse of so-called "tofu-dreg schools" in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In 2011, following his arrest at Beijing Capital International Airport on 3 April, he was held for 81 days without any official charges being filed; officials alluded to their allegations of "economic crimes".

War and art

Henry Moore

Henry Moore was the most important British sculptor of the 20th century, and the most popular and internationally celebrated sculptor of the post-was period. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art.
His forms are usually abstractions of the human figure, usually of the mother-and-child or reclining figures. Moore's works are usually suggestive of the female body, apart from a phase in the 1950's when he sculpted family groups. His forms are generally pierced or contain hollow spaces.

Moore was involved with two art movements, which were Modernism and Modern Art.

Modernism – a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Modern art – includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860's to the 1970's, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. 

Clearly influenced by earlier modernist development in Britain and internationally, Moore has incorporated some of their ideas into his own extensive work.

Paul Nash

Paul Nash was a British surrealist painter and war artist, as well as a photographer, writer and designer of applied art. Nash was among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the twentieth century. He played a key role in the development of Modernism in English art.

During World War II  he produced two series of anthropomorphic depictions of aircraft, before producing a number of landscapes rich in symbolism with an intense mystical quality. These have perhaps become among the best known works from the period. Nash was also a fine book illustrator, and also designed stage scenery, fabrics and posters.

Jonathon Olley

Jonathon  Olley is a British photographer. His art photography focuses on landscapes marked by signs of human folly, but he has also worked as a war reporter and stills photographer for the motion picture industry.

Love and art

Mothers Love

Damien Hirst - For the love of God

 Damien Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is the most know for being a member of the group known as the Young British Artists.
Death is a central theme in Hirst's works. He became famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep and a cow) are preserved—sometimes having been dissected.

The sculpture 'For the love of God' consists of a platinum cast of an 18th-century human skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds, including a pear-shaped pink diamond located in the forehead that is known as the Skull Star Diamond. The skull's teeth are original, and were purchased by Hirst in London.


Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramovic is an Yugoslavia-born controversial performance artist based in New York. Her work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Active for over three decades, Abramović describes herself as the "grandmother of performance art." She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body.

For one her projects Marina would sit at a table with another empty chair opposite. Any one could then go and sit opposite her and she would just look at the other person for 1 minute. That person then would somehow gain and show different emotions such as sadness.