The Wounded Deer (El venado herido in Spanish) is an oil painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo created in 1946.

Through The Wounded Deer, Kahlo shares her enduring physical and emotional suffering with her audience, as she did throughout her creative oeuvre.

Kahlo combines pre-Columbian, Buddhist, and Christian symbols to express her wide spectrum of influences and beliefs.

[6] The Wounded Deer was given by Kahlo to close friends Arcady and Lina Boytler as a wedding gift.

The word "carma" (karma) is written in the bottom left corner of the painting, after the artist's signature and the year of creation.

The Wounded Deer is mostly rendered with green, brown, and gray tones, as well as small measures of blue and red.

[10] Compared to the grand murals of other Mexican contemporaries, such as Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, Kahlo's paintings were small.

This hybrid form is often explained by the artist's influence of pre-Columbian ideas and traditions, which hold the belief that the right foot is represented by a deer.

Kahlo adopted the deer as a symbol for herself because of its connection to the right foot, and in the Aztec calendar, she was born on day nine.

In the painting, the deer's front right leg is raised off the ground, perhaps in a reflection of Kahlo's own impairment.

[15] At the time she painted The Wounded Deer, Kahlo had difficulty walking, which she would attempt to correct through a spinal surgery later that year.

Other interpretations of the figure relate the male and female elements, referred to as hermaphroditic, to pre-Columbian Aztec beliefs that hold relationships between animals and parts of the human body.

An influence of Christianity is also integrated through reference to the story of Saint Sebastian, a martyr who was tied to a tree and shot by arrows.