Going on with our posts on international artists exhibitions, we welcome back Dali, the absolute genious of surrealism.
This time, Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid opens its doors to receive the exhibition “Dalí. All of the poetic suggestions and all of the plastic possibilities” where there are two hundred masterpieces given up by museums and private collections from all over the world. It’s worth to say that more than thirty pieces have never been showed in Spain before.
The exhibition is divided into eleven parts that conform Eugenio Salvador Dali‘s whole artistic career.
In the first three sections, the pieces represent his childhood, self-portraits and landscapes of his land, and his arrival to “La Residencia de Estudiantes” where he met Lorca and Buñuel, period determined by the varied critic of the society that they breathed there and Dalí represents that feeling in his Putrefied Drawings.
The forth section is the core of the exhibition and is devoted to surrealism where the paranoic-criticism method is opened up. In Dalí’s words: “In truth I am no more than an automaton that registers, without judgment and as exactly as possible, the dictate of my subconscious: my dreams, hypnagogic images and visions, and all the concrete and irrational manifestations of the dark and sensational world discovered by Freud… The public must draw its pleasure from the limitless resources of mysteries, enigmas and anguishes that such images offer to the viewers’ subconscious.”
The Angelus by Jean-Fraçois Millet is the main character of the fifth section of the exhibition. Dali created unceasingly during six years with this masterpiece as unique inspiration (1929 – 1935), not only paintings but also objects and several theatre projects that never came to light so far.
The horror and death caused by the Spanish civil war appear in an emphatic and dramatic way in the sixth section. In this period we also frame the seventh section where Dalí started to build surrealistic objects; in 1936 the Exhibition of Surrealistic Objects took place at Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris and it is there where this new surrealism expression was officialized.
Dalí is chased by the wars period, from the exile in France provoked by the Spanish civil war, Dalí and his wife Gala had to move to America due the second world war. The change from one continent to another encouraged his writer vein. The exhibition includes, in the ninth section, Dalí’s drawings made for illustrating “the secret life of Dalí”. The eighth part contains works from this period also influenced by religious and scientific themes.
The next to last section is made up by scenarios and designs for cinema and theatre, perhaps its genius wasn’t so recognized in this aspect but his never ending productivity kept him in touch with the audience.
“Destino”, movie by Dali and Walt Disney
The exhibition comes to an end with the section entitled “The aesthetic enigma” where we find works related to new languages like stereoscopy and holography without forgetting great masters such as Velázquez and Miguel Angel. From the beginning of the 80’s and to the end of his life, René Thom’s mathematic theories were the basis of his creations.
The exhibition will be open until September 2.
For more info and unknown issues about the great Spanish painter, we invite you to take a look at our post on Dali´s retrospective show at Centre Pompidou in Paris .