NEW YORK, NY.- This November, Sotheby’s will unveil Exquisite Corpus, an exceptional private collection of over 80 paintings, drawings and sculptures which capture the breadth, depth, and daring of the Surrealist imagination.

The collection is led by Frida Kahlo’s legendary self-portrait El sueño (La cama) (1940), an evocative meditation on life, death, and rebirth which is poised to set a new auction record for the artist. This exceptional, intimate and powerful work headlines a group of landmark paintings and works on paper by other female pioneers - including Kay Sage, Remedios Varo, Valentine Hugo and Dorothea Tanning - alongside further masterpieces by Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and René Magritte.

The unveiling of Exquisite Corpus follows on the heels of the landmark white-glove Evening and Day sales of Pauline Karpidas’ celebrated London Collection, which together realized £100 million / $136 million — nearly double the pre-sale estimates and the highest total ever achieved for a single-owner auction in London. The historic result, driven by spirited global bidding across Surrealist masterpieces and beyond, underscores the extraordinary momentum in this field as Sotheby’s prepares to present one of the most significant Surrealist collections ever to come to market.

With its rich constellation of artists, Exquisite Corpus offers a rare opportunity to trace the full sweep of Surrealism’s restless imagination — a living body of ideas that continues to evolve, provoke and inspire. Here, Kahlo’s intimate self-portrait sits alongside Dalí’s enigmatic landscape, while Tanning’s ethereal interior contrasts with Sage’s contemplative dreamscapes. These works stand powerfully on their own yet also speak in vivid conversation, offering an encyclopaedic survey of Surrealism’s most influential figures and their circle.

This unparalleled collection will be at the heart of Sotheby’s inaugural marquee auction season at the historic Breuer building in New York.

Frida Kahlo
El sueño (La cama)
1940
Estimate: $40,000,000 – 60,000,000

Frida Kahlo’s El sueño (La cama) (1940), a work of profound intimacy and symbolic power, was painted during a year of intense personal trauma and creative renewal. She depicts herself in repose, lying on a bed that floats weightlessly in a pale blue sky. Her body is intertwined with curling green vines – emblems of life, growth, and regeneration – while above her lies a skeleton, wired with dynamite and holding a bouquet of dried flowers. (Kahlo did in fact keep a traditional papier-mâché skeleton above the canopy of her bed.) Here, the tendrils of life and death are inseparable. In Mexican tradition, death is not banished to the shadows – but commemorated, ritualised, and made familiar.

For Kahlo, the bed was the stage upon which all of life’s dramas unfolded – conception, birth, love, illness and death. After surviving a near-fatal bus accident at the age of eighteen, Kahlo lived with chronic pain and repeated surgeries, and with the ever-present knowledge that each day could be her last. In the long months of recovery after the accident, she was confined to her bed, her family fashioning a special easel and fitting the bed’s canopy with a mirror so she could paint while lying flat. “I am not dead and I have a reason to live. That reason is painting,” she wrote at the time.

El sueño was created at a moment charged with both personal upheaval and creative urgency – the same year that her former lover Leon Trotsky was assassinated, and in the turbulent aftermath of her divorce, and eventual remarriage, to Diego Rivera. Kahlo’s surrealism is not escapist but embedded; she paints not the imagined but the intensified: “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

Though Kahlo famously resisted being labelled a Surrealist, her work was enthusiastically embraced by the movement’s leading figures. Just two years earlier, in 1938, the Surrealism movement’s founder André Breton had helped to organise her first exhibition in New York, writing in the catalogue that “The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.”

In 2021, Sotheby’s established the record for a work by Frida Kahlo when Diego y yo (1949) sold for $34.9 million in New York – the highest price paid at auction for a Latin American artwork.

Known more as the celebrity wife of Diego Rivera than as a groundbreaking painter in her own right during her lifetime, Kahlo has become a global icon since her death in 1954, and she now stands among the most influential and beloved artists of all time. A forthcoming major exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Tate Modern, London in 2026 will celebrate her work and impact on contemporary artists.

Surrealism’s Radical Women

Alongside Kahlo, the collection includes an exceptional group of landmark works by pioneering female Surrealists, including Dorothea Tanning’s spectral Interior with Sudden Joy (est. $2,000,000 – 3,000,000) – one of the finest examples of her work ever to appear at auction, poised to shatter the artist’s record – and Kay Sage’s otherworldly landscape The Point of Intersection (est. $1,200,000 – 1,800,000), last seen at auction over a half century ago.

Dorothea Tanning Interior with Sudden Joy 1951 Estimate: $2,000,000 – 3,000,000

A pivotal figure in American Surrealism, Dorothea Tanning forged a singular path that bridged the movement’s European origins and a distinctly American sensibility. After moving with Max Ernst to Sedona, Arizona in the late 1940s, she found the desert environment so overwhelming in its intensity that she turned inward, creating richly imagined interiors that became arenas for her most probing psychological explorations. Painted in 1951, Interior with Sudden Joy is a landmark example of this vision: a spectral, meticulously staged scene where youthful figures, cryptic inscriptions, and surreal objects come together in a mood of quiet unease.

Kay Sage
The Point of Intersection
1951-52
Estimate: $1,000,000 – 1,500,000

If Tanning’s interiors are charged with human presence, Kay Sage’s landscapes offer a compelling counterpoint; vast, otherworldly expanses where human figures are conspicuously absent. Executed in 1951-52, The Point of Intersection is among Sage’s most haunting compositions - its scaffolding-like forms and taut, silken drapery suspended in an atmosphere of uncanny stillness.

The work dates to the apex of Sage’s output and has been featured in several exhibitions central to her lifetime international recognition, including the 1952 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art (now the Whitney Biennial).

Salvador Dalí
Symbiose de la tête aux coquillages,
1931 Estimate: $2,000,000 – 3,000,000

Salvador Dalí’s Symbiose de la tête aux coquillages is a jewel-like oil on canvas, in which the artist’s meticulous brushwork and extraordinary eye for the unexpected are highlighted on an intimate and entrancing scale.

Painted at the height of his early Surrealist period – the very same year he created his iconic Persistence of Memory – at a moment when Surrealism’s dream imagery and Dalí’s technical mastery converged to striking effect, the work presents a head formed entirely from the delicate curves and spirals of seashells, nestled among an enigmatic outcropping of rocks. Each shell is rendered with the precision of a naturalist yet composed into a form that belongs wholly to the imagination.

The painting was once part of the collection of the French designer Emilio Terry, later passing to André-François Petit in Paris, famed art dealer and gallery owner known for his passionate support of Surrealism. Over the decades it has been shown in landmark exhibitions, from the 1956 Salvador Dalí presentation at the Casino de Knokke-Le-Zoute in Belgium, to the Centre Georges Pompidou’s 1979 retrospective in Paris, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1999.

René Magritte,
La Représentation,
1962
Estimate: $4,000,000–6,000,000

René Magritte’s La Représentation (1962) is a striking work, showcasing one of the very few times the artist turned to the subject of sport. Set against the familiar motifs of a stone wall, a balustrade and the mysterious bilboquet, it shows Magritte once again challenging the way we look at the world, using familiar forms in unexpected ways.

The idea first came to him in 1961, just after he had finished his mural for the Palais des Congrès in Brussels and was searching for fresh challenges. Writing to his dealer Alexandre Iolas, he described the new concept as “remarkable” for allowing him to paint “impossible images: those of Football-players.”

The painting has been in the same collection for nearly sixty years and was lent to the Byron Gallery in 1968 for the gallery’s landmark exhibition that year, which brought together almost fifty works spanning Magritte’s career just two years after his death.

René Magritte,
La Révélation du présent,
1936
Estimate: $2,000,000–3,000,000

René Magritte’s Révélation du present belongs to the important moment in the 1930s when the artist was exploring what he called the “problem of the house.” Ordinary, anonymous bourgeois buildings became the starting point for his subversive imagery – a line of enquiry that would later find its most famous expression in the Empire des lumières series. Closely related in subject and date to La Lecture défendue (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels), the work reflects Magritte’s ability to transform everyday imagery into something uncanny and thought-provoking.

The painting has remained in the same collection for almost sixty years, also lent to the monumental exhibition at the Byron Gallery in 1968 alongside La Représentation.