A 1940 self-portrait painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold Thursday for $54.7 million at Sotheby’s, setting a new auction record for a work by a female artist and shattering previous highs for Latin American art at public sale.
Titled El sueño (La cama), The Dream (The Bed), the painting shows Kahlo asleep in a wooden, colonial-style bed that floats among clouds, draped in a golden blanket and entwined with crawling vines and leaves. Above the bed lies a skeleton wrapped in what the auction house described as dynamite. The catalog called the work “a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death.” The buyer was not identified.
The result surpassed the previous high for a female artist, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, which sold for $44.4 million in 2014, and topped Kahlo’s own public-sale record, the 1949 painting Diego and I, which fetched $34.9 million in 2021. Sotheby’s said the hammer price was more than 1,000 times what the painting brought in 45 years ago, when it sold at the same house for $51,000.
Anna Di Stasi says the record sale of the painting reflects increased appreciation of Frida Kahlos’s work
Anna Di Stasi, head of Latin American art at Sotheby’s, called the result “record-breaking” and said in a news release that it reflects both a deepening appreciation of Kahlo’s work and “the recognition of women artists at the very highest level of the market.” “In El sueño, Kahlo confronts her own fragility, yet what emerges is a portrait of extraordinary resilience and strength,” Di Stasi said.
Bidding for the canvas lasted more than five minutes and narrowed to two collectors before the lot sold, Sotheby’s said. The painting came from a private collection and was legally eligible for international sale; it is among the few Kahlo works that have remained in private hands outside Mexico, where much of her work is protected by cultural-heritage rules that bar sale abroad.
Some art historians and cultural advocates have raised concerns that the work could again disappear from public view after the sale; Sotheby’s said the painting has already been requested for upcoming exhibitions in New York, London, and Brussels. The work was last publicly shown in the late 1990s, the auction house said.
'El sueño (La cama)' by Frida Kahlo soars to $54.7 million, becoming the most valuable work by a woman artist ever sold at auction.
Painted in 1940 during a pivotal decade in her career, marked by her turbulent relationship with Diego Rivera. pic.twitter.com/t6Sni7fIKT
— Sotheby's (@Sothebys) November 21, 2025
The Kahlo lot headlined a sale of more than 100 surrealist works by artists including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning. Although Kahlo is often linked in popular commentary with surrealism, she famously rejected the label, once saying, “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”
Kahlo’s life and art were shaped by chronic pain after a bus accident at 18. Confined to bed for long stretches, she developed imagery in which the bed became, in her words and in critics’ readings, a bridge between worlds, a setting for the exploration of mortality and identity that she pursued until her death in 1954 at age 47.