Frida Kahlo Show Breaks Tate’s Pre-Sale Ticket Record

London’s Tate Modern has sold 41,000 tickets to Frida: The Making of an Icon ahead of the exhibition’s opening tomorrow, making it the highest pre-selling show in Tate’s history and far exceeding the previous record of 32,000 tickets, which was set by David Hockney’s 2017 retrospective at Tate Britain.

The Frida Kahlo event is just one of a series of blockbuster exhibitions scheduled for British venues over the coming months, demonstrating that there is still a big appetite for the genre, despite concerns that the Covid-19 pandemic might have permanently dented visitor numbers.

“We’re pretty blown away by it,” Catherine Wood, Tate Modern’s interim director, told the Guardian. “I do think predictions about the decline of the blockbuster have been proved wrong. We think of them as trust builders, so that audiences will also come into our free displays and discover amazing artists they might not know.”

Demand for tickets to see the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum in September crashed the museum’s website, while other planned blockbusters include Renoir & Love, coming to the National Gallery in October and Nan Goldin: You Never Did Anything Wrong, which will be at the Southbank Centre in November.

These shows follow in the footsteps of the National Gallery’s Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, which attracted more than 330,000 visitors between September 2024 and January 2025, and Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style at the King’s Gallery, which will have been seen by around 400,000 people by the time it closes in April 2027.

Fridamania

Frida: the Making of an Icon will feature more than 30 works by the influential Mexican artist, including rarely seen self-portraits, as well as works by other “Mexican Renaissance” artists including María Izquierdo and Kahlo’s husband Diego Rivera, plus personal artefacts and photographs.

Alongside the exhibition, a programme of installations, public art and cultural activations will take place across London this summer. This includes ¡Frida Icónica!, traditional Mexican papel picado garlands designed by Alejandra Ballesteros, flowing down Carnaby Street and leading to an anamorphic mural.

Six large-scale public murals have been installed around Bankside, close to Tate Modern, all created by artists aged under 25. Together they form the second iteration of Beyond Boundaries, a collaboration between Tate Collective—the gallery group’s scheme for 16-25-year-olds—and Better Bankside, a community group dedicated to improving the area.

The murals include Amy Almeida’s Paisajes Mexicanos (Mexican Landscapes), which celebrates Kahlo’s Mexican heritage while also drawing attention to oil companies’ environmental destruction, and Sharoola’s Here and Now, which—influenced by the ways Kahlo depicted identity—asks what makes a person who they are.

The Frida Kahlo exhibition boosts Tate’s fortunes at a time when the gallery group is still without a permanent director, following the departure of Maria Balshaw this spring. It was announced this week that Balshaw has been appointed as master of University College, Oxford, and will take up her new role in September.