Dalí. Ultralocal / Ultraglobal: BARCELONA

 

There are strong premonitions of situations which make up the present day both in the figure of the artist and in the work of Salvador Dalí, who was the architect of the great artistic paradigm shift of the contemporary age. Indeed, as Chus Martínez points out: “his obsession for self-generation, his insistence on maintaining ambivalence in the reading and interpretation of gender and sexuality, a non-binary identity, his interest in understanding life processes from art and in the company of science, his interest in investigating and expressing vernacular culture in his artwork and in his life…”. The artist himself stated that you have to systematically create confusion, since it sets creativity free: “Everything that is contradictory creates life”. It is this ambivalence that captivates us, attracts us and continues to be of considerable interest to us today.

 

Dalí goes one step further since, although we see the work here, in an exhibition setting, “it is not unreasonable to think that the work could be in the middle of a forest, or rise up before us on a beach at Cadaqués. Salvador Dalí wants everything from us when we are in front of his work; he wants us to let our senses and the feelings of the artwork flow together always” (Chus Martínez).

 

Among the selection of pieces, we highlight Étude pour la Madonna de Port Lligat (Study for The Madonna of Port Lligat) (1949), a study for the first version of the work that Dalí undertook of The Madonna of Port Lligat, which already reveals a great part of the key iconography of his subsequent monumental work. For this work, Dalí was inspired by Renaissance religious paintings, particularly by Piero della Francesca. Gala appears in the centre, seated like a Madonna, and a naked baby Jesus appears to float in space on bread; in the background you can glimpse the Port Lligat landscape and islands. Other prominent works are the anthropomorphic landscapes Primavera (Spring) and Tardor (Autumn), both dated circa 1950, in which the presence of elements of nature, life-death, plenitude-decadence… also show us how Salvador Dalí understands that art, as creation, is the ideal place to question aspects of the origin of life and intelligence.

 

 

Another of the works in which Dalí used his personal iconography was Destino, étude de personnages (Destino, study of characters) (c. 1945), one of the preparatory drawings produced by the artist for the Disney film. Empordà is again present in this drawing and accompanies the characters in their creative process. The film used Dalí’s works as a starting point and was finally released in 2003.

 

This selection of drawings is accompanied by a series objects and photographs of the artist.