A self-portrait of Frida Kahlo sells for $54.7 million, setting a new auction record for a female artist | Frida Kahlo

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

El sueño (La cama) or The Dream (The Bed), which depicts Kahlo sleeping in a bed with a smiling skeleton wrapped in dynamite on the canopy above her, sold on Thursday evening at Sotheby’s Surrealist Art auction after four minutes of bidding.

The price, including fees, exceeds the record set by Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 by Georgia O’Keefe, which sold at Sotheby’s for $44.4 million in 2014.

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

El sueño (La cama) was expected to fetch between $40 and $60 million. The $54.7 million auction breaks the record for Latin American art previously held by Kahlo’s painting Diego y U (Diego and I) in 2021 when it sold for $34.9 million. This painting depicted the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera.

Her paintings have reportedly sold privately for larger sums.

This self-portrait is among the few Kahlo pieces to remain in private hands outside of Mexico, where her works have been declared an artistic monument. Her works in public and private collections within Mexico cannot be sold abroad or destroyed.

The painting comes from a private collection, whose owner has not been disclosed, and is legally eligible for international sale. Some art historians have scrutinized the sale for cultural reasons, while others have expressed concern that the painting — which was last shown publicly in the late 1990s — could once again disappear from public view after the auction. It has already been ordered for upcoming exhibitions in cities including New York, London and Brussels.

Kahlo vividly and rigorously depicted herself and the events of her life, which was turned upside down by a bus accident when she was eighteen. She began painting while bedridden, underwent a series of painful surgeries on her damaged spine and pelvis, and then wore splints until her death in 1954 at the age of 47.

During the years when Kahlo was confined to her bed, she came to view it as a bridge between worlds as she explored her own mortality.

The painting was the star of the sale of more than 100 surrealist works by artists including Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.

Kahlo resisted being described as Surrealism, a dream-like artistic style that focuses on a fascination with the unconscious mind.

“I never painted dreams,” she once said. “I painted my own reality.”

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

“The hanging skeleton is often interpreted as a visualization of her anxiety about dying in her sleep, a very reasonable fear for an artist whose daily existence is shaped by chronic pain and past trauma,” the catalog notes.

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

The Associated Press contributed to this report