"With an estimated price of $40 million to $60 million, "El sueño (La cama)" - in English, "The Dream (The Bed)" - may surpass the top price for a work by any female artist when it goes under the hammer. That record currently stands at $44.4 million, paid at Sotheby's in 2014 for Georgia O'Keeffe's "Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1.""
"The painting up for auction depicts Kahlo asleep in a wooden colonial-style bed, wrapped in a golden blanket embroidered with crawling vines and leaves. Above her, seemingly levitating atop the bedposts, lies a full-sized skeleton. In its catalog note, Sotheby's said the painting "offers a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death." Last exhibited publicly in the late 1990s, the painting is the star of a sale of more than 100 surrealist works by artists"
Frida Kahlo's 1940 self-portrait El sueño (La cama) of her asleep in bed carries an estimate of $40 million to $60 million and could set the highest auction price for a work by a female artist. The current record is $44.4 million for Georgia O'Keeffe's Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1; Kahlo's top auction sale to date is $34.9 million for Diego and I. The painting shows Kahlo asleep in a colonial-style bed under a golden embroidered blanket with a full-sized skeleton levitating above the bedposts. Sotheby's catalog calls the work a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death. The work, last publicly exhibited in the late 1990s, leads a sale of more than 100 surrealist works from an undisclosed private collection. Kahlo's life included a bus accident at 18, prolonged bedridden periods, multiple surgeries, chronic pain, and death at age 47.
Read at Fast Company
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