Frida Kahlo, was known for her surreal and very personal works. She was married to Diego Rivera, also a well-known painter.
She had polio that left her disabled when she was 6 years old. She studied medicine and was going to become a doctor. Because of a traffic accident at age 18 which badly injured her, she had periods of severe pain for the rest of her life. After this accident, Kahlo no longer continued her medical studies but took up painting. She used ideas about things that had happened to her. Her paintings are often shocking in the way they show pain and the harsh lives of women, especially her feelings about not being able to have children.
Kahlo's work is sometimes called "surrealist", she herself did not like that label. Her attention to female themes, and the honesty in her painting them, made her something of a feminist cult figure in the last decades of the 20th century.