The Congress of People for Peace is a 19 x 25 cm oil painting that expressed her brilliantly and uncompromising colored self-portraits dealing with the theme of the human body, identity, and death. Her work is identified as a surrealist painting, even though she lived denying that any of her work was of that kind.
Analysis of the artwork
In the year 1952, the people of Vienna celebrated this piece of art and Mexican artists, such as Frida, and created works in homage to Congress. Like her other paintings, Frida depicted a night and day background representing an everlasting fight between darkness and light in her Aztec culture. In the middle of the painting sits a peace dove that represents the hope she has in life and some words can be seen engraved close to the trees' roots and seen as one with the plant, characteristic to her previous works the same year.
In this piece, inspired by the nature of Mexican artifacts, the country's popular culture made her incorporate a naïve folk style of art to explore her inner self-identity, gender, race, class, and post colonialism in Mexican society. Her painting has a mixed realism with fantasy and solid autobiographical elements.
General Information about the Painting
Frida painted some of her final pieces while bedridden and weak from all the heavy medications and painkillers towards the end of her life. As a result, the quality of her last paintings was highly compromised. This painting, alongside other ones that she did during this period, has vivid shortcomings such as lack of precise brush strokes and detail. It is clear that she still had a deep passion for her work towards her end day, considering the uniqueness that this painting had and how much hope she had with bringing new paintings to life despite her slow demise. From her work, she inspired many more painters to stay committed to the art culture, and despite the hardships that come with their life burdens, they should stick to expressing themselves in such a beautiful manner. As her incredible work keeps inspiring new painters, he efforts have sent ripples through time to the modern art world.
