Salvador Dalí

Overview

"You have to create confusion systematically, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life."

- Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí, was a renowned Surrealist artist whose eccentricity and boundless creativity left an indelible mark on the art world. Known for his flamboyant personality and distinctive mustache, Dalí's works transcended traditional artistic boundaries, encompassing painting, sculpture, film, and even writing. His vivid and dreamlike imagery, filled with melting clocks, bizarre landscapes, and distorted figures, reflected his fascination with the unconscious mind and the irrational. Dalí's relentless pursuit of individuality and shock value made him a prominent figure within the Surrealist movement, showcasing his ability to merge reality with the fantastical. With his technical mastery, Dalí created a unique artistic universe that continues to captivate audiences worldwide, solidifying his place as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

Works

Biography

Salvador Dalí (Figueres 1904 - 1989) was a Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker, influential for his explorations of subconscious imagery. As an art student in Madrid and Barcelona, Dalí assimilated a vast number of artistic styles and displayed unusual technical facility as a painter. It was not until the late 1920s, however, that two events brought about the development of his mature artistic style: his discovery of Sigmund Freud’s writings on the erotic significance of subconscious imagery and his affiliation with the Paris Surrealists, a group of artists and writers who sought to establish the “greater reality” of the human subconscious over reason. To bring up images from his subconscious mind, Dalí began to induce hallucinatory states in himself by a process he described as “paranoiac critical.”

Once Dalí hit on that method, his painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings which made him the world’s best-known Surrealist artist. He depicted a dream world in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed, deformed, or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion. Dalí portrayed those objects in meticulous, almost painfully realistic detail and usually placed them within bleak sunlit landscapes that were reminiscent of his Catalonian homeland. Perhaps the most famous of those enigmatic images is The Persistence of Memory (1931), in which limp melting watches rest in an eerily calm landscape. With the Spanish director Luis Buñuel, Dalí made two Surrealistic films— Un Chien andalou (1928; An Andalusian Dog) and L’Âge d’or (1930; The Golden Age)—that are similarly filled with grotesque but highly suggestive images.

In the late 1930s Dalí switched to painting in a more-academic style under the influence of the Renaissance painter Raphael, and, as a consequence, he was expelled from the Surrealist movement. Thereafter he spent much of his time designing theatre sets, interiors of fashionable shops, and jewelry as well as exhibiting his genius for flamboyant self-promotional stunts in the United States, where he lived from 1940 to 1955. In the period from 1950 to 1970, Dalí painted many works with religious themes, though he continued to explore erotic subjects, to represent childhood memories, and to use themes centring on his wife, Gala. The most interesting and revealing of Dalí’s books is The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942–44).

Exhibitions