AGO finally got it right this year. Picasso was a fiasco from a curatorial point of view.Dot Tuer the curator and a professor at OCADU treated this exhibit with a sensitivity that allowed Frida and Diego to shine through both as individuals and the inseparables they were in life. She shows us how Artists committed to a life of inner expression are not making art as something they do but as something they are.
Frida spent much of her adult life escaping the burden of her fractured physical existence and through her struggle shows that there is so much of us beyond our bodies.
Diego, many of us now would look at him as nothing more than a misogynistic womanizer, and a communist thug. He was though a man seeking more than the surface had to offer. He looked at politics, sex, and art as equal parts of the soup that makes us human. He felt no guilt for any action he committed because he needed to transcend the ordinary to express the sublime in any human phenomena.
Frida expressed the body as a burden to triumph over in order to see the truth of being human. She deconstructed it's skin and bones to show us what lies bare beneath. Her visual realization of the self is as a mere visage. I look into her self portrait with Diego blended into her forehead with traditional wedding garb framing her head, cracks striking her and I feel the complete Frida engaging me.
Diego saw political oppression as an oppression that dug deep into the peasants worn hands. He was a man sympathetic to all others that were trapped by their inner struggles. Their struggles to live with dignity. Something I note in his work was the absence of church in a society whose Catholicism ran deeper than memory served. Who was the oppressor then, the dictatorship of politics or religion? He leaves that up to us to decide.
