A surrealist painting from the 1940s by Frida Kahlo has sold for $54.7m (£41.8m) – shattering the auction record for an artwork by a female artist.

The painting went for more than 1,000 times its original auction price in 1980, after a tense bidding battle between two collectors, according to the Sotheby’s auction house.

The auction also broke the previous record for the highest amount paid for a Kahlo portrait, which sold for $34.9 million in 2021.

The work – titled El sueño (la cama), which is translated to The dream (The bed) – depicts Kahlo asleep in a canopy bed beneath a skeleton entwined with dynamite.

It marks one of the Mexican artist’s most “psychologically charged” self portraits, Sotheby’s said, and was painted during a turbulent chapter in Kahlo’s life – the year her former lover was assassinated and shortly after her divorce and remarriage.

Kahlo, who died in 1954, is widely regarded as one of the greatest painters in the past century and became known for her personal portraits.

Her work often conveyed her painful relationship with her body, disabled through polio in her childhood and serious injuries following a bus accident.

Few could have imagined El sueño (la cama) selling for $55m when it was first went under the hammer at Sotheby’s in 1980 for $51,000, the auction house’s head of Latin American art, Anna Di Stasi, said.

“This record-breaking result shows just how far we have come, not only in our appreciation of Frida Kahlo’s genius, but in the recognition of women artists at the very highest level of the market,” she added.

El sueño (la cama) is one of the few Kahlo paintings in public markets since the Mexican authorities declared her artworks as artistic monuments in the 1980s, preventing them from being exported without authorisation.

Kahlo’s story was adapted into a biographical film starring Salma Hayek in 2002, telling her story of her rocky relationship with her husband, artist Diego Rivera, and her injuries.

The previous highest price at auction for a work by a female artist is Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed / White Flower No.1, which was sold at Sotheby’s in 2014 for $44m.