A self-portrait by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold for US$ 54.7 million at Sotheby’s on Thursday in New York, becoming the most expensive painting ever sold at auction by a woman.
The work, titled El sueño (La cama) — in English, The Dream (The Bed) — breaks the previous record of US$ 44.4 million, set in 2014 by American artist Georgia O’Keeffe.
Sotheby’s said the piece was “painted in 1940 during a pivotal decade in her career, marked by her turbulent relationship with Diego Rivera.”
The painting shows Kahlo asleep in a wooden bed that seems to float in the sky, above which looms a large skeleton whose legs are surrounded by sticks of dynamite.
Anna Di Stasi, Sotheby’s Head of Latin American Art, stated: “El sueño stands among Frida Kahlo’s greatest masterworks — a rare and striking example of her most surrealist impulses.”
She also said, “Kahlo fuses dream imagery and symbolic precision with unmatched emotional intensity, creating a work that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant.”
Kahlo herself resisted being labeled a surrealist. As she once put it: “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”
