Hotels for Frida: The Making of an Icon

Frida Kahlo has become one of the most recognisable faces in art — the level gaze, the flowers, the unflinching self-portraits — but this major Tate Modern retrospective looks past the icon to the artist who made it. Bringing together paintings, drawings, photographs and personal belongings, 'Frida: The Making of an Icon' traces how a young woman from Coyoacán, shaped by illness and a near-fatal accident, turned her own body and life into some of the twentieth century's most arresting images.

Expect the famous self-portraits alongside the letters, clothes and photographs that built her myth. It runs at Tate Modern on Bankside from 25 June 2026 to 3 January 2027, and — as with any Kahlo show — demand will be enormous, so timed tickets go quickly. Staying on the South Bank or just across the river in the City puts the gallery, the turbine hall and the whole riverside walk right on your doorstep.

Frida Kahlo was born in Coyoacan, Mexico, in 1907, and her art grew directly from her body and her pain. Childhood polio left her with a weakened leg, and at eighteen a catastrophic bus accident shattered her spine and pelvis; convalescing in bed, she began to paint the searching self-portraits that would come to define her.

Blending Mexican folk traditions with realism and a dreamlike strangeness, she made roughly a third of her small, intense output self-portraits, confronting miscarriage, illness, identity and her stormy marriage to the muralist Diego Rivera with unflinching candour. Andre Breton hailed her as a self-made surrealist, a label she herself resisted.

Largely overlooked in her lifetime and dead at 47 in 1954, she went on to become one of the most recognisable artists on earth. Tate Modern's 'Frida: The Making of an Icon' looks past the myth to the maker, with more than 130 works and the personal belongings that built the legend.

Tate Modern is Britain's temple to modern and contemporary art — a former power station on Bankside whose vast Turbine Hall stages era-defining installations, with free galleries running from Picasso and Rothko to the very latest. The riverside setting is one of London's best: the Millennium Bridge crosses to St Paul's, and Borough Market, Shakespeare's Globe and the South Bank are all a short stroll.

Blackfriars and Southwark stations are close, and the whole West End sits just over the river. Staying nearby means quiet early-morning gallery time with the Thames on your doorstep.