Frida Kahlo

“Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”

This is how Frida Kahlo (she/her) summed up her way of facing life: with a body marked by pain, but a soul in flight. She remains one of the most celebrated and complex figures in modern art. Painter, poet, lover, and revolutionary, she transformed her own suffering into a language of color and symbolism that transcended borders.

Born in 1907 in Coyoacán, Mexico, Frida’s life was shaped by hardship from the very beginning: first polio at the age of six, and then a bus accident at eighteen that shattered her spine, pelvis, and one leg. Confined to bed for months, she began to paint using a mirror attached to the canopy of her bed, allowing her to look at herself and understand the body that had become both her prison and her muse.

Her self-portraits are intimate and powerful confessions, although she was associated with surrealism, Frida insisted: “I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.” Her life and work reflect physical pain, desire, pride, and defiance, and although she was married to Diego Rivera, she never allowed her identity to be limited by him or by the heteronormative standards of her time.

Frida was openly bisexual, and her relationships with men and women were part of her unapologetic self-expression. Among the most fascinating was her connection with the singer Chavela Vargas, whose voice carried the same mix of sadness and rebellion that Frida poured into her paintings. They met at one of the legendary parties at Casa Azul, and the connection was immediate. Chavela later recalled: “I thought she was out of this world. Her eyebrows were like a bird in flight..”
It is said that Frida confessed in a letter to the poet Carlos Pellicer: “Today I met Chavela Vargas. Extraordinary, lesbian… If she asked, I wouldn’t hesitate to undress front of her.”‍

For a time, Chavela lived with Frida and Diego, until she decided to leave, unable to bear the chaos and intensity surrounding the artist. Even so, their brief love affair remains one of the most powerful intersections between art, desire and freedom in 20th-century Mexico.

Frida’s legacy is that of a woman who refused to hide her pain, her politics, or her passions. Through her art, she redefined what it meant to be seen: a queer, disabled and Mexican woman. She transformed every wound into something sacred. The image of Frida lying in her bed, painting wings on herself, remains one of the most powerful metaphors of queer resilience: even when her body betrayed her, Frida never stopped finding ways to fly.