Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait sold for $54.7 million, breaking auction record for female artists

A 1940 self-portrait by renowned Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold for $54.7 million at a New York art auction on Thursday (November 20, 2025), becoming the top sale price for a work by any female artist.

The painting of Kahlo sleeping in bed – titled “El Sueño (La Cama)” or, in English, “The Dream (The Bed)” – overtook the record held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1”, which sold for $44.4 million at Sotheby’s in 2014.

The highest price at auction for a Kahlo work was previously $34.9 million, paid in 2021 for “Diego and I,” which depicted the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. His paintings are said to have been sold privately for even higher prices.

The Self-Portrait is one of the few Kahlo pieces that are in private hands outside Mexico, where her work has been declared an artistic monument. His works, held in both public and private collections within the country, cannot be sold abroad or destroyed.

The painting comes from a private collection, whose owner has not been disclosed, and is legally eligible for international sale. Some art historians have examined the sale for cultural reasons, while others have expressed concern that the painting – which was last displayed publicly in the late 1990s – might disappear from public view again after the auction. It has already been requested for upcoming exhibitions in cities including New York, London and Brussels.

The piece depicts Kahlo sleeping on a wooden, colonial-style bed floating in clouds. She is wrapped in a golden blanket and entangled in creeping vines and leaves. Above the bed is a skeletal figure wrapped in dynamite.

Kahlo vividly and spontaneously portrayed herself and the events of her life, which was marred by a bus accident at the age of 18. He began painting while bedridden, underwent a series of painful surgeries on his damaged spine and pelvis, then wore a cast until his death in 1954 at the age of 47.

During the years when Kahlo was confined to her bed, she explored her mortality, seeing it as a bridge between worlds.

The painting is the star of the sale of more than 100 Surrealist works by artists including Salvador Dali, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.

Kahlo opposed what she called surrealism, a style of art that is dream-like and focuses on the fascination of the unconscious mind. “I never dreamed,” she once said. “I painted my own reality.”

In its catalog note, Sotheby’s said the painting “presents a spectral meditation on the porous border between sleep and death.”

The catalog reads, “The suspended skeleton is often interpreted as a scene of his anxiety about dying in his sleep, a fear very plausible for an artist whose daily existence was shaped by chronic pain and past trauma.”