In the manner of Frida Kahlo
Mexican, 1907–1954
The Scan, 2026
Oil on masonite
50 × 40 cm
Never painted.
Commissioned for the collection, 2026.
PAB 2026.21.4
She stands in a hospital gown with a gold halo behind her blonde bob and holds up a scan of her own spine like a holy image. Small flames burn among the leaves; an armadillo and a monkey keep watch. In *The Broken Column*, Kahlo painted her spine as cracked stone. This one has been scanned, and the halo is not a joke. It is a claim about who gets to be the saint.
The brief
A woman with a blonde bob standing frontally in a hospital gown, an invented person who resembles no real painter, holding an MRI scan of her own spine like a votive image, leaves and small flames around her. 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.
