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For more than a decade, Georgia O’Keeffe held the auction record for the most valuable work by a female artist, clocking in at $44.4 million. That all changed on November 20, 2025, when a self-portrait by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold for an astonishing $54.7 million during an auction at Sotheby’s in New York. The work was forecast by Sotheby’s to fetch anywhere between $40 to $60 million, far surpassing the artist’s previous auction record of $34.9 million, set in 2021 for the painting Diego y Yo.
Titled El sueño (La cama), or The Dream (The Bed), the 1940 portrait depicts Kahlo resting in bed, a yellow blanket and a tangle of ivy wrapped around her. Above the bed’s canopy, however, is an enormous papier-mâché skeleton, covered not by a blanket but instead by several sticks of dynamite. Plastered on the skeleton’s face is an uncanny smile, creating a visual foil between Kahlo’s peaceful repose and the sky in the painting’s background. The painting resembles a memento mori, fitting neatly into the artist’s wider creative framework and other unsparing self-portraits she produced throughout her life.
Following a severe bus accident at 18 years old, Kahlo began painting while bedridden, exploring her own mortality through themes of consciousness, pain, memory, and trauma. Beds were a common motif throughout her work as well, due to how often she was confined to one after her near-fatal accident and subsequent surgeries.
“The suspended skeleton is often interpreted as a visualization of her anxiety about dying in her sleep, a fear all too plausible for an artist whose daily existence was shaped by chronic pain and past trauma,” the auction’s catalog essay notes.
Before landing on the auction block, El sueño had not been publicly exhibited in nearly three decades. Notably, it also stands as one of the few Kahlo pieces that has remained in a private collection outside of Mexico, where her oeuvre has been considered an artistic monument since 1984.
“[El sueño has been] one of the very few works of this calibre still in private hands,” Anna Di Stasi, Sotheby’s head of Latin American Art, told CNN. “This painting has all the hallmarks of a signature Frida: the self-portrait, a surrealist imagery, and most importantly, a psychological intensity and that sense of communion between artist and viewer.”
But the sale doesn’t just set a new record for a work by a female artist. It has also smashed records for a work by a Latin American artist, solidifying the growing interest in art from the region. El sueño was included as part of the “Exquisite Corpus” auction, which featured more than 80 surrealist paintings, drawings, and sculptures by such artists as René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning.
“El sueño stands among Kahlo’s greatest masterworks—a rare and striking example of her most surrealist impulses,” Stasi added. “[She] fuses dream imagery and symbolic precision with unmatched emotional intensity, creating a work that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant.”
Frida Kahlo’s 1940 self-portrait El sueño (La cama) sold for $54.7 million at auction, breaking the record for the most valuable work by a female artist.
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Sources: Frida Kahlo Portrait Sells for $55 Million, Setting Her Auction Record; Frida Kahlo self-portrait sells for $54.7 million, setting new record for female artists; Frida Kahlo self-portrait sells for $54.7m to set new auction record for a female artist; A Frida Kahlo painting broke records at auction on Thursday
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