This year’s blockbuster exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is that not-to-be-missed experience presenting Mexican artist Frida Kahlo as never seen before. A communist at heart, Kahlo had survived polio at young age, and a near fatal traffic accident was the cause of pain and suffering throughout her life.

Indeed, Kahlo’s fame does not just rest on her iconic stature in the feminist world and the exhibition seeks to address the broader remit of her existence in a bid to present a more articu­late and intimate narrative.

Kahlo’s eventful life and her resolute personality complement her artistic production, labelled as naïve folk art, which is a predominantly biographical mix of realism and fantasy. This exhibition seeks to showcase and complement both.

Four sequential sections seek to present a narrative that goes beyond a traditional art, histori­cal exhibition showcasing periods and styles, influences and inspirations.

Her very own personal ob­jects, sealed off right after her demise until 2004, are the highlight of this intensely emotive exhibition project, here presented akin to relics of a sacred subject. Indeed, the exhibition is but one seamless flow moving from an introductory biographical setting juxtaposing images and video to Kahlo’s Mexican cultural context and its bearing on her artistic activity.

Mexican culture is a continuous thread and stands out, particularly in the final section with a magnificent display of Kahlo’s wardrobe presented next to the paintings featuring that same costume or a version of it.

Kahlo’s captivating self-portraits stand out at strategic points throughout – a proud Kahlo whose gaze defies the very picture plane framed to hang in the exhibition. She is, after all, painting her inner self more than anything else, and complementing the other works on display which refer to her tragic personal experiences.

Four sequential sections seek to present a narrative that goes beyond a traditional art historical exhibition

Looking into the images that Kahlo painted of herself is like gazing into her soul, but this is also captured by Nickolas Muray’s captivating portraits which succinctly capture Kahlo’s soul over and over again.

One particular photo, which Kahlo compares to the works of Florentine Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca, caught my attention as a fitting comparison to Caravaggio’s boy holding a carafe.

It’s not just pose and stance that evoke the Caravaggesque. The vivid palette and Kahlo’s captivating gaze scrutinise the viewer’s presence beyond the physical and her deep gaze pene­trate even the thickest of skins.

The photographs on display are extraordinary testimony in themselves, showing Kahlo working with her legs in callipers, confined to a wheelchair or in bed.

What I consider to be the most powerful section juxtaposes a series of six showcases propped with Mexican bedposts displaying intimate objects, including crutches, medicine bottles and corsets, body casts with the communist hammer and sickle painted over them, painkillers, crutches and built-up shoes.

A large-scale photo poster presents Frida Kahlo’s watchful gaze, further scrutinising her audience as she lies crying in bed. This is, indeed, a shrine to Kahlo’s painful existence which defied the odds in search for her refusal to be recognised as physically disabled.

There is much pain in Kahlo’s gaze, and the objects displayed in each of the six showcases bear witness to a life that defied it.

Indeed, the exhibition re­minded me very much of cultural sainthood. This recent topic of discussion deals with the ways and means how poets, authors and other personalities are studied, read and reviewed in ways akin to Catholic sainthood. This exhibition exhumes the artist, warts and all, and presents identity in a series of powerful dialogues and juxtapositions between objects, artworks and image.

The Kahlo which the exhibition presents is the human crea­tive whose pain and suffering speak for her resilience never to succumb to being labelled as invalid.

It is true, as already pointed out in some of the exhibition reviews published to date, that Kahlo’s paintings take a back seat in comparison to Kahlo’s clothes, makeup and iconic image.

Her creativity is treated here as almost incidental to her charismatic personality but this is not an art exhibition in the traditional sense of the discipline.

What gets featured, instead, is the human and his multiface­ted forms of artistic expression manifest throughout her life, of which art is one powerful manifestation.

Alexander Debono is senior curator at MUŻA.