Overview

• El sueño (La cama) will be offered on November 8 in New York within Exquisite Corpus, a private-collection sale of roughly 80 Surrealist works.
• The painting has been out of public view for about three decades and will preview in London, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, and Paris before the auction.
• At the estimate range, it would exceed Kahlo’s $34.9 million auction record from 2021 and could surpass Georgia O’Keeffe’s $44.4 million benchmark for a woman artist set in 2014.
• The 1940 composition depicts Kahlo sleeping in a canopy bed beneath a dynamite-wrapped skeleton, an imagery set often read as a meditation on mortality.
• Sotheby’s has not identified the consignor, with reports pointing to the late Nesuhi and Selma Ertegun, and the sale is slated for the auction house’s Breuer building.