On June 13, 1954, Frida Kahlo died at Casa Azul, the Blue House where she was born only 47 years earlier. A grief-stricken Rivera revealed, “Too late now I realize the most wonderful part of my life has been my love for Frida.” He died three years later.

Kahlo left behind around 200 works. Nearly a third are her ubiquitous self-portraits, including 55 out of 143 paintings. As Dasal says, Kahlo’s self-portraits “present her life in unvarnished ways.” Her gaze is often defiant and her compositions raw with the unflinching honesty of her physical suffering. “My painting carries with it the message of pain,” said Kahlo.

Currently on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art, the exhibit Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection highlights 24 works by Kahlo and 12 by her husband, Rivera. Curated by Dasal, their work is showcased in context with fellow Mexican Modernists amidst a varied collection of 135 pieces.

In Diego on my Mind (Self-portrait as Tehuana), Kahlo shows her husband’s significance by emblazoning him on her forehead. Tendrils radiate from her crown and headdress, like a web of thoughts holding her stationary. She plays with pattern as reality in Self-Portrait with Monkeys, the parallel fingers of the monkeys’ hands echoing Kahlo’s elaborate hairstyle. Her smooth brushwork is restrained yet intricate.

In Kahlo’s surreal oil The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (México), Myself, Diego, and Señor Xolotl, she weaves Aztec mythology into layered embraces; in the center, Diego becomes her child. While she resisted the label of surrealist by saying she painted her reality instead of dreams, surrealist leader André Breton became Kahlo’s champion, and wrote the preface for her first solo exhibition catalog.