It is the highest price paid at auction for a Latin American artwork.
The record had previously been set by a work by Diego Rivera, with whom Kahlo had a decades-long tumultuous relationship. His piece sold for $9.76m in 2018.
Kahlo’s painting “Diego y Yo” was was one of her final self-portraits.
The work depicts a tearful Kahlo with her husband Rivera painted above her eyes.
It was described by Sotheby’s at the auction on Tuesday as “one of the most important works by Kahlo ever to come to auction”.
The buyer has been identified as Eduardo F. Cosantini, who founded a museum in Argentina, according to the New York Times.
The painting was last auctioned in 1990 for $1.4 million.
Kahlo, widely regarded as one of the greatest painters of the 20th Century, was famed for her intimate self-portraits reflecting pain and isolation.
She lived from 1907 to 1954 and proudly promoted indigenous Mexican culture through her art.
Her work also chronicled her painful relationship with her body, disabled through childhood polio and severe injuries following a bus accident.
