La Perla Negra: A tribute to Frida Kahlo

A major exhibition of paintings by Spanish artist Lita Cabellut in tribute to late Mexican artist Frida Kahlo opens at the Opera Gallery London today.

It is a stunning and hugely expressive body of work which charts Kahlo’s tragic life while incorporating many of Cabellut’s own experiences.

Cabellut introduces the exhibition in her own words (via a translator), here:

One way or another, life confronts us with catastrophes so that we can learn to elevate the physical or psychological part of us as humans to a level that logic is incapable of reaching. This is why I identify so strongly with Frida Kahlo.

Kahlo is the ultimate symbol of life and death. If we think about the way in which she described death and life in her diaries. She draws and writes with the same brush, with the same force and passion she composes her phrases and it is difficult to distinguish in which one of the two she is singing love sonnets.

I think that each artist has their own story and it would be very worrying if we were to accept and give an ethical and philosophical value to something that the artist had not lived themselves, and had not given their own personal form to. Each experience, whether catastrophic or vulnerable, has a force only when it is really authentic.

There is a strong link in my work to the German expressionists; the bravery, the provocation and the intention to consider the intellect, the emotions and the historical conditions of society at a particular moment. It is an attitude of tremendous sincerity to be journalists of the society, which is something I admire and that influences me.

Art is a tremendously powerful medium. It is impossible to protect yourself from it. If we close our eyes, it will come in through our pores. Art is beauty, poetry and is something that humanity will always be influenced by. It is an electric shock for our intellects and our souls.

'La Perla Negra: A tribute to Frida Kahlo by Lita Cabellut' is at the Opera Gallery London until 21 April