Frida Kahlos self-portrait sells for $54.7 million, shatters public sale report for feminine artists

A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo offered Thursday (November 20, 2025) for $54.7 million at a New York artwork public sale and have become the highest sale worth for a piece by any feminine artist.

The portray of Kahlo asleep in a mattress — titled “El sueno (La cama)” or in English, “The Dream (The Bed)” — surpassed the report held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” which offered at Sotheby’s for $44.4 million in 2014.

The highest worth at public sale for a Kahlo work was beforehand $34.9 million, paid in 2021 for “Diego and I,” depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. Her work are reported to have offered privately for much more.

The self-portrait is among the many few Kahlo items that has remained in personal palms exterior Mexico, the place her physique of labor has been declared an inventive monument. Her works in each private and non-private collections throughout the nation can’t be offered overseas or destroyed.

The portray comes from a personal assortment, whose proprietor has not been disclosed, and is legally eligible for worldwide sale. Some artwork historians have scrutinised the sale for cultural causes, whereas others have raised concern that the portray — final exhibited publicly within the late Nineties — might once more disappear from public view after the public sale. It has already been requested for upcoming exhibitions in cities together with New York, London and Brussels.

The piece depicts Kahlo asleep in a picket, colonial-style mattress that floats within the clouds. She is draped in a golden blanket and entangled in crawling vines and leaves. Above the mattress lies a skeleton determine wrapped in dynamite.

Kahlo vibrantly and unsparingly depicted herself and occasions from her life, which was upended by a bus accident at 18. She began to color whereas bedridden, underwent a collection of painful surgical procedures on her broken backbone and pelvis, then wore casts till her loss of life in 1954 at age 47.

During the years Kahlo was confined to her mattress, she got here to view it as a bridge between worlds as she explored her mortality.

The portray is the star of a sale of greater than 100 surrealist works by artists together with Salvador Dalí, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.

Kahlo resisted being labeled a surrealist, a method of artwork that is dreamlike and centres on a fascination with the unconscious thoughts. “I by no means painted desires,” she as soon as mentioned. “I painted my very own actuality.”

In its catalog be aware, Sotheby’s mentioned the portray “provides a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and loss of life.”

“The suspended skeleton is commonly interpreted as a visualization of her nervousness about dying in her sleep, a concern all too believable for an artist whose every day existence was formed by power ache and previous trauma,” the catalog notes.