In the manner of Frida Kahlo
Mexican, 1907–1954
Self-Portrait with Insulin Pump, 2026
Oil on masonite
50 × 40 cm
Never painted.
Commissioned for the collection, 2026.
PAB 2026.21.1
She faces us square on, grey-streaked hair cropped short, in an embroidered blouse, and at her waist, clipped to her skirt, is an insulin pump with its little screen lit. Around her the jungle is crowded: a monkey, a hummingbird, a deer, a tortoise, a heart in flames. Kahlo painted her medical history as calmly as her flowers. The pump belongs in this company. It keeps her alive too.
The brief
A frontal self-portrait of a young woman with short cropped grey-streaked hair and thin brows, an invented person who resembles no real painter, an insulin pump visible at her waist, surrounded by dense green leaves and a hummingbird. Mid-century Mexican folk-modernist oil painting, a frontal figure with an unflinching direct gaze against dense tropical foliage, flat saturated greens, reds and golds, small symbolic animals and objects, naive precise detail, a votive ex-voto stillness, matte paint on board. Museum photograph of the oil painting on board, flat even lighting, no frame, no text, no wall, no floor, cropped to the canvas edge.
Written to the house rules. The painter's name does not appear.
Take it home
The painting on this room's wall, at its own proportions, nothing written on it.
