Frida Kahlo painted about 55 self-portraits, according to commonly cited counts of her surviving paintings.
Self-portraiture became central to Kahlo’s career. Her works repeatedly examine identity, pain, gender, clothing, ancestry, and the body. Many accounts summarize her output as roughly 143 paintings, with approximately 55 being self-portraits.
The number is usually presented as an approximate art-historical count rather than an immutable total. Catalogues can differ in how they classify works, especially paintings that include Kahlo but are not straightforward self-portraits. The figure also does not mean that every painting was a direct mirror image: Kahlo often used symbolic animals, costumes, backgrounds, and split identities to construct the image.