A show on relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

Passionate love, marriage, childlessness, affairs, divorce – and yet another reconciling marriage. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s passionate relationship was turbulent. Many exhibitions have emphasized private and personal matters when presenting works by the two Mexican artists. In a new exhibition, Denmark-based ARKEN chooses an alternative focus by examining how each artist regarded and represented themselves as well as the Mexican identity.
 
Frida Kahlo depicted everyday life and brought Mexican culture into her art. She became a pioneer of modern art by representing herself from the position of a female artist at the very periphery of the Western art scene. She questioned the issue of gender in both everyday life and art. She introduced new artistic themes which hardly had had any visibility in the history of art previously.

With simple forms and condensed motifs, Diego Rivera created a popular idiom accessible to everyone. In his own words he saw a potential masterpiece everywhere – in the local customs and in the everyday life of ordinary people. His paintings ascribe dignity to everyday life and can be seen as monuments of existential human conditions. In his art, Rivera included motifs and experiences that were unfamiliar to high culture.
 
Kahlo and Rivera each developed their distinct modern style rooted in the Mexican cultural heritage. In the exhibition you can experience the diversity in their artistic strategies; Frida Kahlo’s personal, autobiographic point of departure opposed to Diego Rivera’s existential yet revolutionary utterances. Common to Kahlo and Rivera was the wish to create new, closer connections between art and life.

Simultaneously, ARKEN, in collaboration with Carl-Henning Pedersen’s & Else Alfelt’s Museum in Herning, is showing a major exhibition of the work of this Danish Cobra artist on the eve of his 100th birthday. Like many other artists of his time, Carl-Henning Pedersen drew freely on inspiration from the art and artiefacts of other times and other cultures. In his wildly imaginative imagery, widely different visual idioms flow together across time and place. In his art, the artist sought the same special, universally human primal force that surged through his own being. The exhibition elucidates this theme through the selection and presentation of his works.