Frida Kahlo self-portrait sells for $55m, units public sale file for a feminine artist

A surrealist portray from the Forties by Frida Kahlo has bought for $54.7m (£41.8m) – shattering the public sale file for an art work by a feminine artist.

The portray went for greater than 1,000 occasions its unique public sale worth in 1980, after a tense bidding battle between two collectors, in accordance with the Sotheby’s public sale home.

The public sale additionally broke the earlier file for the best quantity paid for a Kahlo portrait, which bought for $34.9 million in 2021.

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.

It marks one of many Mexican artist’s most “psychologically charged” self portraits, Sotheby’s stated, and was painted throughout a turbulent chapter in Kahlo’s life – the yr 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 biggest painters up to now century and have become identified for her private portraits.

Her work usually conveyed her painful relationship along with her physique, disabled via polio in her childhood and severe accidents following a bus accident.

Few might have imagined El sueño (la cama) promoting for $55m when it was first went beneath the hammer at Sotheby’s in 1980 for $51,000, the public sale home’s head of Latin American artwork, Anna Di Stasi, stated.

“This record-breaking result shows just how far we have come, not only in our appreciation of Frida Kahlo’s genius, but in the recognition of women artists at the very highest level of the market,” she added.

El sueño (la cama) is without doubt one of the few Kahlo work in public markets for the reason that Mexican authorities declared her artworks as inventive monuments within the 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 her story of her rocky relationship along with her husband, artist Diego Rivera, and her accidents.

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.