A recent homage to Salvador Dali reveals the surrealist artist in a more intimate light, living and working from his home in Spain. Entitled, At Home With Dali, the show includes images from a varied collection of Dali’s personal friends and photographers.
The Spanish surrealist painter and printmaker is widely known for his revolutionary exploration of subconscious imagery. Throughout his life, Dali assimilated a vast range of artistic styles, resulting in his unusually technical paintings.
Subconscious Imagery
During the latter part of the 1920s, Dali became influenced by Sigmund Freud’s writings on the erotic significance of subconscious imagery. Subsequently, he began to affiliate himself with the Paris Surrealists; a group of subversive artists and writers who sought to establish the “greater reality” of the human subconscious over reason. Dali began to induce hallucinatory states in himself by way of a mental process, “paranoiac critical”. Due to this, Dali’s method expanded rapidly. He has since become known as one of the most celebrated surrealist artists of our modern history.
Dali’s Sprawling Labyrinth
In 1930s Lligat, Dali’s place of work, rest and life was inside a fisherman’s hut. This location, Dali‘s official home, is open to the landscape, the light and enjoys a remote location. The resulting architectural form is a sprawling labyrinthine, grown over four consequent decades.
“Like a real biological structure… each new pulse in our life had its own new cell, its room.”
Dali once said,
“Port Lligat is the place of production, the ideal place for my work. Everything fits to make it so: time goes more slowly and each hour has its proper dimension. There is a geological peacefulness: it is a unique planetary case.”
Source: salvador-dali.org
Dali’s home is now a museum, containing objects connected to his artistry.
At Home With Dali
The show’s contributors include fashion photographer Horst. P. Horst, Ricardo Sans, Melitó Casals, Lies Wiegman, and Dalí’s biographer, Robert Descharnes. Dali’s personal life in photographs capture his time throughout the 1950s and 1960s, in his home and work environments of Port Lligat. This is where he lived for over 50 years. The exhibition communicates Dali on a more personal level that one might understand by merely observing his works of art. Known as an enigma, the eccentric exhibitionist is a famous guest of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Dali appears in a number of Warhol’s screen tests. Contrary to his larger-than-life public image, his home in Port Lligat counters his high energy city-life with a more revealing and tranquil place of peace.
At Home With Dali is showing a the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida and continues indefinitely.
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