Galería Arte Contemporáneo (Amberes 12)

Lola Alvarez Bravo’s gallery on Calle Amberes in Mexico City’s Zona Rosa. In Hayden Herrera’s Frida it holds Frida’s only one-woman show in Mexico, in April 1953, where she arrives by ambulance and receives guests from her bed.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Frida	Hayden Herrera	turning point	Frida is carried into her 1953 retrospective on a stretcher and holds court from her four-poster bed.

Frida — Hayden Herrera (1983)

Source: Frida - A Biography of Frida Kahlo · Original · Readwise highlight

Lola Alvarez Bravo decided to organize an exhibition of Frida’s paintings in her Galería Arte Contemporaneo at Amberes 12, in the city’s fashionable Pink Zone.

• Role: turning point
• In the book: Chapter 23, “Homage to Frida Kahlo”, opens in the spring of 1953 with Lola Alvarez Bravo planning the show. Frida’s four-poster bed is set up in the gallery; minutes after the guests arrive, sirens sound and she is carried in from an ambulance on a stretcher, so suddenly that the photographers drop their cameras. Painters and friends file past to kiss her, among them the old Doctor Atl on crutches, and Henestrosa calls it a procession of monsters, like Goya.
• Why it matters: It is her one great public triumph at home and her last exhibition, staged as a spectacle that mixes celebration and death; held anywhere else it would lose the small-gallery crush the book describes.