Frida Kahlo painting breaks record for most expensive work by any female

Iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's painting 'El sueño (La cama)' sold for $54.7 million at a Sotheby's auction on Thursday, setting a new auction record for the artist and making it the most expensive work by a woman artist ever sold at auction.

Painted in 1940, during a period of intense personal upheaval and artistic transformation, 'El sueño (La cama)' is, according to Sotheby's, among the most psychologically charged and symbolically rich self-portraits in Kahlo's catalogue of work. 

In the painting, Kahlo portrays herself asleep in a wooden colonial-style bed, wrapped in a golden blanket embroidered with crawling vines and leaves.

Above her rests a full-sized skeleton wrapped in strings of dynamite, crowned with a vibrant bouquet and nestled on pillows. 

The final price is more than 1,000 times what the painting made when it last appeared on the market in 1980, selling then for $51,000. 

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