An arresting self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, featuring the artist slumbering beneath a tangle of vines in a carved canopy bed with a skeleton reclining above her, will be auctioned by Sotheby's on Thursday night in New York. The sale of the 1940 painting, called El sueño (La cama) , is widely anticipated to set a record for the most expensive artwork made by a woman.

" El sueño stands among Frida Kahlo's greatest masterworks — a rare and striking example of her most surrealist impulses," said Anna Di Stasi, Sotheby's head of Latin American art, in a statement. "Kahlo fuses dream imagery and symbolic precision with unmatched emotional intensity, creating a work that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant."

Sotheby's estimates that El sueño (La cama) will sell for between

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