Frida by Ishiuchi Miyako, Michael Hoppen gallery

After the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo died in 1954, her husband Diego Rivera locked away 300 of her personal belongings in a bathroom of The Blue House, their marital home, now the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico.
Rivera demanded that the bathroom remain locked even after his own death. It wasn't until 2004, when the curators at the house-turned-museum orchestrated a dramatic break-in, that these secret personal items were revealed. 
A collection of poignant photographs of Kahlo’s hidden possessions were taken in 2011 by photographer Ishiuchi Miyako. Now this intimate collection of images will be exhibited in London for the first time. 
Frida Kahlo exhibition London: Michael Hoppen gallery
Japanese photographer Miyako made her name documenting the impact that individuals and society leave behind, through our garments and treasures. In her earlier series, Mother’s (2000 - 2005) and Hiroshima (2007-) she photographed the personal artefacts of those whose lives were changed in the social climate of post-war Japan.
Here Miyako presents the lifeless, once treasured clothes that Frida Kahlo used to camouflage and distract from her physical ailments following a near fatal bus accident when she was 18 and the effects of polio as a child.
Kahlo’s iconic wardrobe -- the traditional Tehuana dresses, the sunglasses, darned tights and paint splattered corsets and even her prosthetic leg -- come together to make a portrait of the woman who once owned them. The narrative element of these images as a collation is shaped by fashion curator, Circe Henestrosa.
While Kahlo's artwork is iconic and exhibited in top galleries around the world, this intimate photography exhibition gives a rare insight into the personal life of the artist as revealed directly by the things little things that made up her world.