A captivating 1940 self-portrait by the renowned Mexican artist Frida Kahlo fetched an impressive USD $54.7 million (AUD $84.9 million) at auction on Thursday, setting a new record for the highest price achieved by a female artist’s work at auction.

This iconic piece, titled “El sueño (La cama)” or “The Dream (The Bed)” in English, features Kahlo depicted asleep in a bed. It shattered the previous record held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” which sold for USD $44.4 million (AUD $68.9 million) back in 2014.

The auction, conducted by Sotheby’s in New York, also set a new benchmark for Kahlo herself, eclipsing her previous record for a Latin American artist’s work sold at auction.

Previously, her 1949 piece “Diego and I,” which portrays the artist alongside her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, sold for USD $34.9 million (AUD $54.2 million) in 2021.

There are reports that Kahlo’s artworks have fetched even higher prices in private sales.

The self-portrait is among the few Kahlo pieces that have remained in private hands outside Mexico, where her body of work has been declared an artistic monument.

Her works in both public and private collections within the country cannot be sold abroad or destroyed.

The painting comes from a private collection, whose owner has not been disclosed, and is legally eligible for international sale.

Some art historians have scrutinised the sale for cultural reasons, while others have raised concern that the painting – last exhibited publicly in the late 1990s – could again disappear from public view after the auction.

It has already been requested for upcoming exhibitions in cities including New York, London and Brussels.

The buyer’s identity was not disclosed.

The piece depicts Kahlo asleep in a wooden, colonial-style bed that floats in the clouds.

She is draped in a golden blanket and entangled in crawling vines and leaves.

Above the bed lies a skeleton figure wrapped in dynamite.

Kahlo vibrantly and unsparingly depicted herself and events from her life, which was upended by a bus accident at 18.

She started to paint while bedridden, underwent a series of painful surgeries on her damaged spine and pelvis, then wore casts until her death in 1954 at age 47.

During the years Kahlo was confined to her bed, she came to view it as a bridge between worlds as she explored her mortality.

Before the auction, her great-niece, Mara Romeo Kahlo, celebrated the significance of the upcoming sale during a recent interview with The Associated Press in Mexico City.

“I’m very proud that she’s one of the most valued women, because really, what woman doesn’t identify with Frida, or what person doesn’t?” she said.

“I think everyone carries a little piece of my aunt in their heart.”

The painting was the star of a sale of more than 100 surrealist works by artists including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.

Kahlo resisted being labeled a surrealist, a style of art that’s dreamlike and centres on a fascination with the unconscious mind.

“I never painted dreams,” she once said. “I painted my own reality.”

In its catalog note, Sotheby’s said the painting “offers a spectral meditation on the porous boundary between sleep and death.”

“The suspended skeleton is often interpreted as a visualization of her anxiety about dying in her sleep, a fear all too plausible for an artist whose daily existence was shaped by chronic pain and past trauma,” the catalog notes.

Earlier this week, a Gustav Klimt painting that helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust sold at Sotheby’s for USD $236.4 million (AUD $366.9 million).

Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” became one of the most expensive pieces of artwork ever sold at auction, second only to Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” at USD $450 million ($698.4 million) the record-holder over all and among male artists.