A recent television series based on the lifetime of Frida Kahlo is on the best way. Variety reports that the artist’s estate has collaborated with the Miami-based company BTF Media to create a show offering a faithful and more authentic perspective on the artist’s turbulent life. 

Few figures within the art world have undergone quite the extent of speculation that the celebrated Latinx artist has been subjected to. Her legacy has been exhaustively excavated, inspiring a number of biographies, documentaries and movies – including the Oscar-winning biopic Frida [2002], starring Salma Hayek. And, despite the iconoclastic nature of her work and her personal ideology, her image has been appropriated endlessly as an icon of spurious girl power values across popular culture, commodified as Barbie dolls, face filters, emojis, cosmetics, and even co-opted by Theresa May who notoriously wore a bracelet adorned with Kahlo’s portrait when she took the stage on the 2017 Conservative Party Conference. 

Kahlo’s existence was famously marred by pain, contracting polio as a toddler and being injured in a near-fatal traffic accident, the results of which plagued her throughout her temporary life. Her dramatic marriage, divorce, and re-marriage to fellow artist Diego Rivera are well-documented. Within the pages of her own notebook, she compared their meeting to a deathly tragedy: “I suffered two great accidents in my life, one by which a streetcar knocked me down … the opposite accident is Diego.”

This upcoming TV series guarantees to supply a recent perspective on the much-mythologised artist. In accordance with the painter’s great-niece, Mara Romeo Kahlo, “the series seeks to portray Frida as she has never been seen before. The goal is to present a novel perspective based on what her family knows about her and show how she really lived her life.”

“This project will allow Frida to be shown as a girl whose art represented empowerment, hope and power, and can allow her family to share with the audience how her legacy continues to encourage hundreds of individuals around the globe,” said Alfonso Duran, general director of Frida Kahlo Management.

BTF co-founder Ricardo Coeto added, “Frida was known for her vibrant self-portraits. Her self-portraits had different themes, resembling her identity, her human body, and death. She was considered a hero to many because she didn’t allow society to get to her; as an alternative, she used her struggles as her strength.”

Each episode will undertake to explore the lesser-known points of Kahlo’s life and reveal truths in regards to the real artist, as known and loved by those closest to her. More details of the project are set to be unveiled at a later date.