Semiotics of flora in the works of Frida Kahlo

This article provides a semiotic analysis of flora in twelve paintings by the Mexican primitive artist Frida Kahlo, and also examines a number of factors that influenced the appearance of certain plants in her works. The purpose of this study is a detailed analysis of the plants depicted in the selected paintings by Frida Kahlo and an attempt to interpret the symbolism of these plants based on information about the artist's life, her knowledge and research in the field of biology and the history of pre-Columbian civilizations. The authors of the article set themselves the task of demonstrating the non-randomness of the choice and the deep meaning of each plant in the paintings of Frida Kahlo, for whom the hobby of botany was more than just a hobby. The methodological basis of this work is the methods of critical and comparative analysis. The scientific novelty lies in the little-studied nature of this aspect of the Mexican artist's work. The authors of the article for the first time conducted a detailed analysis of the plants depicted in Frida Kahlo's paintings. Having studied the artist's paintings depicting plants, it was possible to identify three main themes of Frida Kahlo's creativity: fertility, the unity of man with nature and duality (the connection of a woman and a man, life and death, light and darkness). As a result of the research, the authors of the article come to the conclusion that all images with plants, even fictional ones, are a kind of self-portraits. A less obvious conclusion, due to the exceptionally narrow focus of the topic, was the identification of Frida's rarely mentioned botanics hobby.

Frida Kahlo, visual semiotics, Latin America, flora, primitivism, duality, human, nature, life, death