The Mexican Surrealist Sofia Bassi never saw the recognition granted to her contemporaries in her lifetime, but the market is finally catching up. Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London has opened "Floating Between Earth and Sky," the artist's first European solo exhibition, presenting 16 works through November 14. The show arrives as demand for Bassi's paintings reaches new highs at auction; the gallery is also taking a 1969 round landscape, priced at $85,000, to Frieze London. Bassi's biography reads like fiction. She picked up a paintbrush only in her 50s, painted alongside circles that included Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, and in 1967 was one of seven women exhibited with Frida Kahlo in a landmark show at Mexico City's Museum of Modern Art. A year later she was imprisoned in Acapulco, having pleaded guilty to the murder of her son-in-law. Her oeuvre grew markedly darker between 1968 and 1972, with prison-period works signed "ELC" — short for "En la cárcel," Spanish for "in prison." The gallery notes that imprisonment became inseparable from her public image and overshadowed her practice, so that her work receded from the dominant histories of Mexican modernism and Surrealism. The numbers tell a different story now. In May, Mexico's Morton auction house sold her 1974 woodscape Muñeca Reina for 800,000 Mexican pesos — about $46,000 — a record. Days ago, an untitled 1992 work sold at Sotheby's for $44,800, doubling its high estimate. Artnet Price Database figures show her auction average at $29,291 this year, more than double 2025's $12,897 and far above the $3,000-to-$7,000 range of the 2010s. Collector Christian Levett has acquired four works for his museum devoted to female artists; her paintings are also held by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Mexico City's Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition, organised with Bassi's Foundation — run by her daughter-in-law and granddaughter — and Mexico City's Georgina Pounds Gallery, focuses on the prison-period works, priced between $20,000 and $400,000. Pounds, whose gallery staged the largest Bassi exhibition to date this spring, says an institutional show is in the offing.