Immersive Frida Kahlo: the intimate made grandiose and sensual

04 Apr 2022 - photos supplied by publicist

We enter into a vast space surrounded by animations of a bustling small town, complete with a ghostly streetcar that turns into a cinematic wipe. The floor beneath us ripples and flows onto the walls and this showing of Immersive Frida Kahlo begins.

Kahlo's imagery and style is now a part of mainstream popular culture. She was the subject of an acclaimed AGO exhibit in 2012, Chavela was one of her many lovers, Cirque du Soleil's magnificent Luzia paid homage in 2016, Coco animated her for a poignant sight gag, and Gucci gleefully admitted to copying her image for their 2018 Gucci and Beyond collection. Many of the images in Immersive Frida Kahlo are familiar, and for anyone who admires Kahlo and is cognizant of her history and impact, so are the photographs and references. The entranceway contains flat TV screens that provide a crash course in Kahlo, but there is no narration or guidebook. It wouldn't hurt to do a quick google before seeing Immersive Frida Kahlo to put the visuals into context.

Immersive Frida Kahlo explores Kahlo's many influences and then integrates them with her body of work. The result is a hybrid between a biographical documentary, a living breathing photo album or gallery show, and a thrill ride. A Mexican village fills the walls only to pull back and then shift focus so that we are awed by a vista showing just how many people live in the slums behind the tourist facade. Vines crawl across the walls and Kahlo's talismanistic parrots and monkeys peek through the foliage. The dresses on a clothesline drift languidly across an impossiblly indigo sky. A factory swallows all but a corner of the sky, while a conveyer belt carefully deposits Mexican gods and Day of the Dead icons into a toilet. Kahlo stands above the Goldberg-esque monstrosity impassively, occasionally exhaling or inhaling a puff of smoke. New York's skyscrapers rise, in a vertigo-inducing explosion, out of the floor to tower over us. It is a feast for the eyes and always in motion.

Much of the animation is two-dimensional (as is a painting) but moves in three-dimensional space. This works best for the starker images and watching the parade of Day of the Dead skulls made me hope for a Halloween-themed future Immersive. Because the walls are two stories tall and four times that wide, Immersive Frida Kahlo does become immersive. Animations of her "The Wounded Deer" painting are hauntingly huge. The deer/Frida's head slowly turns to stare directly into our souls. But the animation can also be too much and obscures a golden opportunity. Kahlo's paintings were all small canvases, intimate and possibly a reaction to the bravado of her longterm lover Diego Rivera's gigantic murals. At one point several of Kahlo's self-portraits appear on easels arranged on the steps to an imposing museum. The easels move towards us in an inexorable flow and the self-portraits become massive before fading out of focus.

It would have been extraordinary to see those paintings, and all the others, in detail. Larger than life. Frozen even for a moment for examination and appreciation. It would not be how Kahlo originally created the works, or perhaps even the effect she intended. But it would have let us bask in the work closely, the intricate details, the delicacy of the brushstrokes. And as Immersive Frida Kahlo is, like any curated production, already offering an interpretation and inflation of the imagery, the paintings and their magic would survive. This is a family show so despite the entrance warning of graphic imagery for those easily triggered, the sensuality and torment of Kahlo's life remains on the walls. Her bisexuality, arguably the impetus behind her re-discovery, is, aside from one photograph and one animated painting, a subtext. Her fervent communism is represented by an oblique, but horrifying in a current context, montage of revolution. "My Birth" appears but is carefully placed at a distance.

The emphasis is on the beauty in Kahlo's work and the flow of overlapping images induces wonder. Fans of Kahlo will want to sit through it again, newly minted fans will be inspired to search deeper, to savour the actual work and discover the remarkable life this artist lived. And everyone will take at least a small fragment of the colour, imagery or expressiveness with them. This Frida Kahlo may be immersive but Kahlo's spirit is everywhere in the small details.