Frida Kahlo's 'The Dream (The Bed)' Expected to Break Million-Dollar Record at Sotheby's Auction

The upcoming art sale places this painting at the center of a renewed surrealist boom, with estimates that could set an unprecedented figure for a Latin American artist.
Frida Kahlo and "The Dream (The Bed)" challenge the global market: the piece could set a new benchmark for Latin American art.

Sotheby's announced that the self-portrait, painted in 1940, will be offered with an estimated price of between $40 and $60 million, a figure that could reshape the landscape of major sales and elevate the value of a work created by an artist from the continent to new heights.

Frida Kahlo and 'The Dream (The Bed)'
With this, the auction house anticipates a significant impact on the surrealist scene, boosting searches and positioning on modern art, the surrealist market, and emblematic 20th-century female painters. At the center of the advertisement is a piece whose symbolic power has been studied for decades. The canvas depicts the artist reclining, surrounded by organic motifs that allude to the return of life and accompanied by a suspended skeleton—a vision that explores notions of fragility, transition, and emotional reconstruction.
Created shortly after her separation from Diego Rivera, the composition again uses the bed as a narrative territory: a place where her physical pain, her most intimate creation, and her dialogue with Mexico's visual tradition converge.

According to specialists from the auction house itself, the painting represents a point of intersection between European modernism, Mexican symbolism, and the psychological explorations of Surrealism.

This perspective positions the painting as a bridge between movements and generations, especially now that international recognition is growing for artists such as Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Kati Horna.

The increased interest in this movement, which has doubled its presence since 2018 according to internal analysis, opens a space where Kahlo's work is perceived as key to understanding the transformations of the period.

Surrealist Resurgence
The piece, kept for more than four decades in a private collection dedicated to surrealism, is on display in New York before the final sale.

For experts, seeing it in dialogue with works from its time underscores the role the artist played in the expansion of modern art and in the reinterpretation of the surrealist imagery in America.

If the auction reaches the highest projections, Frida Kahlo and "The Dream (The Bed)" will close a historic chapter for the art market, solidifying the painter as one of the most influential and enduring voices of the 20th century.

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