They say that life imitates art, and for one artist that couldn’t be truer. The artist, Frida Kahlo’s life was marked by awful events that expressed themselves in her art.

Kahlo’s tragedies first began with an accident in 1925 when the bus she was traveling on crashed into a streetcar, and Kahlo was impaled by the steel handrail. The handrail went through her hip, and she suffered many injuries to her spine and pelvis, as a result, she painted during her recovery period, many of which depict the pain she was suffering through. One of her more famous pieces entitled, “The Broken Column”, depicts a mostly naked self-portrait with Kahlo split down the middle showing a shattered spine, while wearing a medical brace around her upper body, and her skin covered in nails. This piece was meant to show the pain she felt through the multiple surgeries she received.

Only four years later she married famed muralist Diego Rivera, however, their marriage wasn’t a happy one. They mostly lived separately and moved a lot when Rivera would be commissioned for artwork in other places around Mexico and the United States, but Kahlo’s pain steamed from Rivera’s many affairs, even one with her sister. As a result, she cut off her trademark long hair and tried for a baby, but tragically miscarried, only causing more heartache. Kahlo expressed herself in many pieces, one significant one was the “Henry Ford Hospital”, in which she showed herself in a hospital bed surrounded by many items, like flowers, a fetus, a pelvis, and more, all connected to her through red strings.

Kahlo took the pain she felt and turned it into beautiful artwork for all the world to see, proving that good things can result from terrible tragedies.