Esrawe Studio + Cadena Asociados – has intervened in two spaces in the exhibition Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting at the High Museum in Atlanta.

The exhibition presents the work of the two artists, as well as a series of photographs narrating Frida and Diego’s life together and passion for one another. The two spaces intervened in by Esrawe Studio + Cadena Asociados are profoundly inspired by the personal relationship between the two artists, and by their work. In the intervention, Esrawe Studio + Cadena Asociados used as motifs two colours that are representative of the work of the artists: yellow and red.

Yellow
“Insanity, disease, cowardice, part of the sun and of joy!”
Frida Kahlo

This space, which is entirely saturated in yellow, focuses
on an archetypical local chair as an element in the Mexican
colonial heritage, and a frequently recurring object in the
private and personal spaces inhabited by Diego and Frida.
The repetition of the element creates a large-scale sculpture
that is full of texture and geometry, which is homogenised
by the colour yellow and alludes to the sun and happiness.

Red
“Blood? Who can say?”
Frida Kahlo

This space – steeped in the colour red – is inspired by the
close relationship between Frida and the bed to which she
was confined for much of her life, due to the injuries she
sustained in a tragic accident at the age of eighteen. It was
on this item of furniture – and with the help of a mirror that
Esrawe Studio + Cadena y Asociados - at the High
Museum of Art she had installed on the bed’s canopy – that Frida created several of the self-portraits in which she recorded her suffering.

The colour is reminiscent of these feelings, and it also
evokes Diego in the colour of the Communist Party.
These two intervened spaces translate into contemporary language a part of the life and work of the couple, at the same time that they explore the limits between colour, sculptural installation and functional space.

FRIDA & DIEGO: PASSION, POLITICS AND PAINTING.
February 15th – May 12th, 2013
High Museum, Atlanta

This exhibition at the High Museum in Atlanta features more than 120 paintings and drawings by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, including an important group of photographs by artists who captured the couple’s shared passion for each other and for Mexico’s revolutionary culture during the 1920s and 1930s.

The exhibition is co-organised by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City, in association with the Vergel Foundation, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of Mexican Art, and Galeria Arvil.

The High Museum of Art is the leading art museum in the southeastern United States. The Museum has more than 13,000 works of art in its permanent collection; it also has an extensive anthology of 19th- and 20th-century American art; significant holdings of European paintings and decorative art; a growing collection of African American art; and burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary
art.