This masterpiece just became the most expensive artwork by a woman ever sold at auction.

Frida Kahlo’s El sueño (La cama) (1940) is a deeply symbolic and surreal meditation on mortality, vulnerability, and the intimate presence of death. In the painting, Kahlo lies peacefully asleep in her bed, in a wooden colonial-style bed, wrapped in a golden blanket embroidered while  skeleton wired with explosives hovers crowned with a vibrant bouquet above her, a haunting yet humorous reminder of death’s unpredictability. The vines curling across the bedspread evoke the fragile entanglement of life and dreams, blurring the boundary between reality and the subconscious. Rooted in Mexican traditions like Día de los Muertos, the skeleton is not merely macabre but familiar, even affectionate. Having endured lifelong physical pain and confinement to her bed, Kahlo transforms her suffering into visual poetry, confronting death not with fear but with irony and defiance.