A lesser-known self-portrait by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is set to go under the hammer at Sotheby’s, potentially achieving a record sale. The painting, El Sueño (La Cama) – The Dream (The Bed) – is estimated at $40-60 million (£29-44 million) and could surpass the highest price ever paid for a work by a female artist. The current record is $44.4 million (£32.9 million) for Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1, sold at Sotheby’s in 2014. The most expensive Kahlo sold at auction to date is Diego and I, which fetched $34.9 million (£25.8 million) in 2021.
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Julian Dawes, vice-chairman and head of Impressionist and Modern Art for Sotheby’s Americas, highlighted the rarity of the piece. “It’s not just one of the more important works by Kahlo, but one of the few that exists outside Mexico and is not in a museum collection,” he said. Painted in 1940, El Sueño (La Cama) depicts Kahlo lying in a four-poster bed floating in a pale blue sky, surrounded by vines, with a papier-mâché skeleton clutching flowers atop the canopy. Dawes described it as a psychological self-portrait created at the height of her powers.
The work was last exhibited publicly in the late 1990s and will headline a sale of over 100 surrealist works from a private collection, including pieces by Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. Interest in surrealist art has surged, with Sotheby’s reporting its market share rose from 9.3% to 16.8% between 2018 and 2024. Despite Kahlo resisting the surrealist label, her exploration of the subconscious and fantastical imagery aligns her with the movement.
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El Sueño (La Cama) is currently on view at Sotheby’s London gallery until Tuesday before travelling to Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong and Paris ahead of the New York sale on 8 November. Dawes noted the painting’s resonance in today’s world: “There are so many parallels between the 1920s and the 2020s, coming out of a global pandemic and confronting social, political and economic upheavals, making her work more relevant than ever.”
