A self-portrait by Frida Kahlo has sold for $54.7m (£41.8m) at Sotheby’s in New York, setting a new auction record for any female artist. The painting, titled El sueño (La cama) or The Dream (The Bed), depicts Kahlo asleep beneath a canopy adorned with a smiling skeleton wrapped in dynamite.
The sale surpasses the previous record of $44.4m set by Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 in 2014. The price, which includes buyer’s fees, came after four minutes of bidding, exceeding the pre-sale estimate of $40–60m.
The painting also breaks the record for Latin American art, previously held by Kahlo’s Diego y Yo which sold for $34.9m in 2021. Sotheby’s has not disclosed the buyer, but the work is among the few Kahlo pieces still in private hands outside Mexico, where her oeuvre is declared an artistic monument and cannot be sold abroad.
Some art historians have scrutinised the sale on cultural grounds, while others fear the painting – last publicly exhibited in the late 1990s – may again disappear from view. It has already been requested for exhibitions in New York, London and Brussels.
Kahlo, who resisted being labelled a surrealist, said: “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” The auction house described the work as “a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death”, reflecting her lifelong struggle with pain and trauma following a bus accident at age 18.
