The Mexican painter Magdalena Frida Carmen Kahlo Calderónn better known as Frida Kahlo has spent her entire life in Mexico City, although she has worked and traveled in the United States. Her work consists of around 250 paintings, very often in small formats, a certain number having been painted while she was bedridden. She painted many self-portraits, often testifying to her physical and moral suffering (Hospital Henry-Ford, 1932, Without Hope, 1945), alone or in the company of animals (Self-portrait with a necklace of thorns and a hummingbird (1940), Me and my parrots (1941)…), sometimes family portraits.
His paintings are imprinted with Mexican culture: traditional dress, local jewellery, portraits of natives. A few still lifes, all very strong, slip into the middle of these self-portraits; they have the particularity of mainly involving round fruits: watermelons, melons, squash, grapefruit, avocados, kiwi, passion fruit, mango. These fruits are often treated as open flesh on wounds or sexual organs, which is precisely the case here: on the far right of the table for the open melon or on the right for the banana and the prickly pears and even, at the top in the center, in the back of the parrot where a strange outline appears a bit like the anthropomorphic montages of Archimboldo, except that here it is not a nose or a finger!
