A painting by Frida Kahlo sold for nearly 800 billion VND.

Completed five years before her death in 1954, the oil painting "Diego and I"(Diego and I)This is one of Frida Kahlo's last self-portraits, revealing her tumultuous marriage to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera – who is depicted in the painting on his forehead, above Kahlo's teary eyes.

Kahlo's work has surpassed the standard that Rivera set earlier in 2018, when one of his paintings sold for $9.76 million, equivalent to $10.75 million today when inflation is taken into account.

A Sotheby's spokesperson said that Eduardo F. Costantini, the founder of a museum in Buenos Aires (the capital of Argentina), successfully acquired the painting "Diego and I" and added it to his private collection.

In an interview with The New York Times on November 17, Costantini shared that he had set a high price for the painting “Diego and I” and planned to exhibit it at the Museum of Latin American Art, also known as Malba, in Buenos Aires next year. “I had seen this painting many times in books, and then suddenly it was put up for auction,” Costantini said, “This made me start hoping to have it in my collection.”

Adriana Zavala, who curated the 2015 Kahlo exhibition in New York, said: “This is an important work by Frida Kahlo from a period when her physical pain was becoming increasingly severe, and her paintings were also becoming increasingly chaotic.”

"She has lost her usual elegance and composure."

Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 in Mexico City. She began painting in 1926 while recovering from a bus accident that left her with chronic pain. She often created rich imagery of life and death, blending violence and vulnerability in ways that shocked viewers by challenging gender norms. She held her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, before dying at the age of 47 in 1954.

The value of Kahlo's paintings has increased significantly since 1980, when one of her portraits sold for $85,000. Some art historians attribute this soaring price to the dwindling number of her works. The last time "Diego and I" was sold at Sotheby's was in 1990, which was also the first work by a Latin American artist to sell for more than $1 million.

Khanh Ha