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A 1940 self-portrait by renowned Mexican artist Frida Kahlo could make history on Thursday when it goes on sale at Sotheby's New York location.
With an estimated price of $40 million to $60 million, "El sueño (La cama)", translated to "The Dream (The Bed)", may surpass the top price for a work by any female artist in art history.
As of now, the record is held at $44.4 million for Georgia O'Keeffe's "Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1", paid at Sotheby's in 2014.
The highest price at auction for a Kahlo work is $34.9 million, paid in 2021 for "Diego and I", depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. Her paintings are reported to have sold privately for even more.
The painting up for auction features 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, holding flowers.
In its catalogue 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 including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.
Kahlo's work often depicts herself and events revolving around her life, which was turned upside down by a bus accident at 18.
She started to paint while bedridden, underwent a series of painful surgeries on her damaged spine and pelvis, and then wore casts until her death in 1954 at age 47.
