Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) is the most publicly recognisable figure in the history of Surrealism — a Catalan artist whose technical mastery, theatrical self-presentation, and inexhaustible visual imagination made him simultaneously one of the most serious painters of the twentieth century and one of its greatest showmen.
Expelled from the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid for refusing to be examined by professors he considered unqualified to judge him, he travelled to Paris and was introduced to André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, whose movement gave Dalí the theoretical framework for a visual practice he had already been developing instinctively. His dreamlike compositions — hyper-realistic in technique, completely irrational in subject — deployed the visual language of dreams and the unconscious with the precision of a craftsman. The melting watches of The Persistence of Memory (1931), the spindly-legged elephants, the figures that dissolve into constituent parts: these images have entered the cultural consciousness as thoroughly as any produced in the twentieth century.
His flight to New York during the Second World War opened a new phase of commercial and cultural engagement — collaborations with Coca-Cola, Chupa Chups, Walt Disney, and Alfred Hitchcock that anticipated by decades the relationship between fine art and commercial culture that would preoccupy Pop Art in the 1960s. He was ahead of his moment in almost everything.
The works available through Creed Gallery include the Woman Aflame bronze sculpture and the Pastorale hand-signed Artist's Proof etching from the Historia de Don Quichotte de la Mancha suite — works that represent Dalí's sculptural and graphic practice at their most resolved. Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.
