Frida Kahlo self-portrait sells for $55m, setting auction record for a female artist

A surrealist portray by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo has bought for $54.7m (£41.8m) – shattering the public sale report for an paintings by a girl. The portray, from the Nineteen Forties, went for greater than 1,000 instances its unique public sale worth in 1980, after a tense bidding battle between two collectors, based on the public sale home Sotheby’s.The work – titled El sueño (la cama), which is translated to The dream (The mattress) – depicts Kahlo asleep in a cover mattress beneath a skeleton entwined with dynamite.The public sale broke the earlier report determine for a feminine artist’s work of $44m, in addition to for the best quantity paid for a Kahlo portrait – $34.9 million in 2021.The self-portrait is certainly one of Kahlo’s “psychologically charged” artworks, Sotheby’s mentioned, and was painted throughout a turbulent chapter in her life – the 12 months her former lover was assassinated, and shortly after her divorce and remarriage.Kahlo, who died in 1954, is broadly thought to be one of many best painters prior to now century and have become recognized for her private portraits.Her work usually conveyed her painful relationship along with her physique, disabled by polio in her childhood and critical accidents following a bus accident.Few may have imagined El sueño (la cama) would ultimately promote for $55m when it was first went below the hammer at Sotheby’s for $51,000 in 1980, the public sale home’s head of Latin American artwork Anna Di Stasi mentioned. “This record-breaking consequence reveals simply how far we’ve got come, not solely in our appreciation of Frida Kahlo’s genius, however within the recognition of girls artists on the very highest degree of the market,” she added.The earlier highest worth at public sale for a piece by a feminine artist is Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed / White Flower No.1, which was bought at Sotheby’s in 2014 for $44m.El sueño (la cama) is among the few Kahlo work within the public market for the reason that Mexican authorities declared her artworks as inventive monuments within the Nineteen Eighties, stopping them from being exported with out authorisation.Kahlo’s story was tailored right into a biographical movie starring Salma Hayek in 2002, telling the story of her rocky relationship along with her husband, artist Diego Rivera, and her accidents.