LONDON (AP) — Frida Kahlo’s face is without doubt one of the greatest identified in artwork, due to her daring and difficult self-portraits.
A lesser-seen self-depiction by the Mexican artist goes up for public sale at Sotheby’s in what could possibly be a record-setting sale.
With an estimated worth of $40 million to $60 million, “El sueño (La cama)” – in English, “The Dream (The Bed)” — might surpass the highest worth for a piece by any feminine artist when it goes underneath the hammer on Nov. 8. That document at present stands at $44.4 million, paid at Sotheby’s in 2014 for Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1.”
The best worth at public sale 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 work are reported to have offered privately for much more.
“It’s not just one of the more important works by Kahlo, but one of a few that exists outside of Mexico and not in a museum collection,” mentioned Julian Dawes, vice chairman and head of impressionist and fashionable artwork for Sotheby’s Americas. “In order each a murals and as a chance available in the market, it couldn’t be extra uncommon and particular.”
Kahlo vibrantly and unsparingly depicted herself and occasions from her life, which was upended by a bus accident at 18. She began to color whereas bedridden, underwent a collection of painful surgical procedures on her broken backbone and pelvis, then wore casts till her demise in 1954 at age 47.
Painted in 1940, “El sueño (La cama)” exhibits the artist, wreathed in vines, mendacity in a four-poster mattress floating in a pale blue sky. A skeleton wired with dynamite and clutching a bouquet of flowers lies atop the cover.
The picture is exploding with symbolism and seems like an allegory – however the artist actually did have a papier-mâché skeleton on high of her mattress.
Dawes mentioned it is a psychological self-portrait by an artist at her peak.
“Her greatest works derive from this moment between the late 1930s and the early 1940s,” he mentioned. “She has had a variety of tribulations in her romantic life with Diego, in her own life with her health, but at the same time she’s really at the height of her powers.”
Final exhibited publicly within the late Nineties, the portray is the star of a sale of greater than 100 surrealist works by artists together with Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. They’re from a personal assortment whose proprietor has not been disclosed.
A century after Andre Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto” outlined a revolutionary inventive motion characterised by unsettling juxtapositions and paradoxical statements, curiosity in – and costs for – surrealist artwork are booming. Surrealism’s share of the artwork market rose from 9.3% to 16.8% between 2018 and 2024, in keeping with Sotheby’s. Magritte’s “L’empire des lumières” offered final yr for $121.2 million, a document for a surrealist work.
Kahlo resisted being labeled a surrealist, however Dawes mentioned her “fascination with the subconscious” and use of otherworldly imagery place her squarely in that custom.
He mentioned it’s no shock the style is present process a resurgence.
“There are so many interesting parallels between the 1920s and the 2020s,” Dawes mentioned. “Coming out of a crippling global pandemic, a world that has to confront war on a more graphic and intimate level that had ever been experienced before — and economic and political and social forces swirling in the background that are eerily similar.”
The Kahlo portray is on present at Sotheby’s in London till Tuesday, after which excursions to Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong and Paris earlier than the sale in New York.
