Colourful love of Frida and Diego on show in Adelaide

Frida & Diego: Love & Revolution opens at the Art Gallery of South Australia on Saturday, featuring 150 works, many never seen in Australia before.

The couple was at the forefront of Mexico's post-revolutionary avant-garde from the 1920s till the 1950s, known for bringing together international modernism with native Mexican styles.

Much of their art is in private collections - Madonna reputedly owns several Kahlos - and a small number of works are on show to the public at institutions in Mexico and the US.

It all makes the Adelaide show a rare chance to see a substantial body of work by the couple, with paintings, photographs, textiles, films and murals.

It's all installed on a palette of 16 colours, including a yellow floor, just like Kahlo's kitchen.

"I love the vibrancy and luscious colour, I thought Australians would really love that especially in the middle of winter," AGSA curator Tansy Curtin told AAP.

The exhibition is the very last stop in an international tour of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman collection, which has been travelling the world for 23 years.

Collection curator Magda Carranza de Akle was initially worried about the colourful exhibition design but she said it was a refreshing success.

With ubiquitous reproductions of Kahlo's work, many people might have the wrong idea about her paintings, she said.

"It really opens the door to disappointment but also to being in awe of the actual work."

There's every chance of the latter in the Adelaide show - some of the artworks are masterpieces that have been declared national treasures of Mexico.

Of about 150 paintings Kahlo produced in her life, 10 of them are in the exhibition.

There are other works by Mexican Modernists including Manuel and Lola Alvarez Bravo, Miguel Covarrubias, Maria Izquierdo, Carlos Merida, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

But what does Mexican Modernism have to say to Australia in particular?

Australians may not know a great deal about Mexican history, according to Curtin, but there are parallels in terms of colonisation and the way indigenous aesthetics helped build a post-revolutionary national identity.

"I think it is a really profound moment and it's something we could look at in terms of the way art changes culture," she said.

Rivera was famous during the artists' lifetimes for his large murals on revolutionary themes: his Man at the Crossroads fresco at New York's Rockefeller Center was famously destroyed because it featured Lenin.

But in the years since Kahlo died, aged 47, in 1954, her far more personal work has seen her become a political, feminist and queer icon.

Frida & Diego: Love & Revolution will open at the Art Gallery of South Australia on Saturday.

Australian Associated Press