LONDON — Frida Kahlo’s face is among the best known in art, thanks to her bold and unflinching self-portraits. A lesser-seen self-depiction by the Mexican artist is heading to Sotheby’s in a sale that could set a new benchmark. With an estimated price of $40 million to $60 million, “El sueño (La cama)”—“The Dream (The Bed)”—could surpass the current top price for a work by a female artist when it goes under the hammer on Nov. 8. The record for a female artist sold at auction stands at $44.4 million, paid in 2014 for Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1.” The highest price paid at auction for a Kahlo work is $34.9 million, for “Diego and I,” a 1949 painting depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. Private sales of Kahlo works are also reported to exceed those figures on occasion.
"It's not just one of the more important works by Kahlo, but one of a few that exists outside of Mexico and not in a museum collection," said Julian Dawes, vice-chairman and head of impressionist and modern art for Sotheby’s Americas. "So as both a work of art and as an opportunity in the market, it could not be more rare and special."
Kahlo vibrantly and unsparingly depicted herself and events from her life, which was upended by a bus accident when she was 18. She began painting while bedridden, endured a series of surgeries on her damaged spine and pelvis, and wore casts until her death in 1954 at age 47. Painted in 1940, “El sueño (La cama)” shows the artist, wreathed in vines, lying in a four-poster bed floating in a pale blue sky. A skeleton wired with dynamite sits atop the canopy, clutching a bouquet of flowers. The image radiates symbolism and can be read as an allegory—but the artist did have a skeleton positioned above her bed, a fact Dawes notes as part of the work’s meaning.
Dawes described it as a psychological self-portrait captured at Kahlo’s creative peak, a period spanning the late 1930s into the early 1940s when she faced personal turmoil related to her health and romantic life with Rivera, yet produced some of her most powerful work. Public exhibition history adds to the work’s rarity: it had not been shown publicly since the late 1990s, and Sotheby’s frames its sale as a rare opportunity to acquire a major Kahlo work outside of Mexico and not part of a museum collection.
The work anchors a sale of more than 100 surrealist-era works from a private collection, with other lots from Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. The owner’s identity has not been disclosed. In recent years, interest in surrealism—an art movement defined by startling juxtapositions and dreamlike imagery—has grown, contributing to rising prices in the market. Sotheby’s notes that surrealism’s share of the art market rose from 9.3% in 2018 to 16.8% in 2024, reflecting robust demand for the genre. Magritte’s “L’empire des lumières” sold last year for $121.2 million, a record for a surrealist work.
Although Kahlo resisted being labeled a surrealist, Dawes said her fascination with the subconscious and use of otherworldly imagery place her squarely within that tradition. He suggested the current moment has echoes of the movement’s 1920s roots and notes how global events—pandemic recovery, evolving geopolitical tensions, and social change—have kept surrealist works in vogue.
The Kahlo painting is on show at Sotheby’s in London until Tuesday, then travels to Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong and Paris before the sale in New York.