Frida Kahlo self-portrait sells for $54.7m to set new auction record for a female artist | Frida Kahlo

A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold for $54.7 million (£41.8 million, A$84.7 million) at a New York art auction, setting a new highest sale price for a work by any female artist.

El sueño (La cama), or The Dream (The Bed), depicting Kahlo asleep in bed, with a smiling skeleton wrapped in dynamite in the canopy above her, sold after four minutes of bidding at the surrealist art auction at Sotheby’s on Thursday night.

The price tag, which includes fees, is higher than Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, which sold for $44.4 million at Sotheby’s in 2014. He surpassed the record of his work 1.

Sotheby’s has not yet identified the successful buyer of the painting.

El sueño (La cama) was expected to make between $40 and $60 million. The $54.7 million sale broke the record for Latin American art, previously set by Kahlo’s painting Diego y Yo (Diego and I) which sold for $34.9 million in 2021. This painting depicted the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera.

His paintings were reportedly sold privately for even higher prices.

The self-portrait is among the few pieces remaining in private hands outside Mexico, where Kahlo’s work has been declared an artistic monument. His works, which are in both public and private collections in Mexico, cannot be sold abroad or destroyed.

The painting comes from a private collection with an undisclosed owner and is legally available for international sale. While some art historians have viewed the sale for cultural reasons, others have expressed concern that the painting, which was last exhibited publicly in the late 1990s, may disappear from the public again after the auction. Requests have already been made for exhibitions to be held in cities such as New York, London and Brussels.

Kahlo vividly and unsparingly portrayed herself and the events of her life, which was turned upside down 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, and then wore a cast until his death in 1954, aged 47.

During the years confined to her bed, as she explored her mortality, Kahlo began to see it as a bridge between worlds.

The painting became the star of the sale of more than 100 surrealist works by artists including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.

Kahlo resisted being labeled a surrealist, an art style that focuses on the magic of the dreamlike and unconscious mind.

“I have never painted dreams,” he once said. “I drew my own reality.”

Sotheby’s said in its catalog note that the painting “offers a ghostly meditation on the porous border between sleep and death.”

“The suspended skeleton is often interpreted as a visualization of the anxiety of dying in his sleep, an all-too-plausible fear for an artist whose daily existence is shaped by chronic pain and past traumas,” the catalog states.

It’s been a big week for art auctions in New York; Sotheby’s sold $706 million in modern art on Tuesday; A painting by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, sold for $236.4 million, became the second most expensive work sold at auction and the most expensive work of modern art sold at auction. Rival auction house Christie’s also sold $690 million worth of 20th-century art.

The Associated Press contributed to this report