The Art of transforming pain into art: Frida Kahloʼs world

Abstract

This paper analyses the personage of Frida Kahlo who faced her own awkward position from the outset without ever surrendering to misfortune, succeeding in transforming immobility into an artistic opportunity and in transfiguring suffering into art.

Although she was seriously injured, having survived a fatal crash compelled a rebirth from her: having to cope with her own figure in the mirror, with pain deriving from her serious health condition, she bravely decided to start anew moved by a positive feeling and by the need for beauty which she poured into her paintings and into her multiple, unconventional portraits.

And whether in order to describe afflictions there is the need for beauty, then also words play a completely privileged role, with their poetry, charm, redeeming power. Stories related to Frida – targeting children and teenagers – aim at generating a new paradigm, at quitting with the habit of reading the adventures of unreal and conventional characters, and at succeeding in creating an emphatic bond between the artist and the readers, bringing them close to a woman who is at times the estranging and melancholic interpreter of a ‘fairy-taleʼ in which she overcomes all tribulations, almost magically, transfiguring them into energy and beauty on canvas.