Dalí at Reina Sofía

The Museo Reina Sofía presents a major exhibition dedicated to Salvador Dalí, one of the most comprehensive shows yet held on the artist from Ampurdán. Gathered together on this unique occasion are more than 200 works from leading institutions, private collections, and the three principal repositories of Salvador Dalí’s work, the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (Figueres), the Salvador Dalí Museum of St. Petersburg (Florida), and the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), which in this way are joining forces to show the public the best of their collections.
 

The surrealist period constitutes the nucleus of the show at the Museo Reina Sofía, with special emphasis on the paranoiac-critical method developed by the artist as a mechanism for the transformation and subversion of reality. The exhibition is made up of eleven sections containing not only paintings and drawings but also documentary material, photographs, Dalí’s own manuscripts, magazines and films of enormous importance for an understanding of the artist’s complex universe.

The exhibition, a great success with the public when shown recently at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, aims to revalue Dalí as a thinker, writer and creator of a peculiar vision of the world. One exceptional feature is the presence of loans from leading institutions like the MoMA (New York), which is making available the significant work The Persistence of Memory (1931); the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is lending Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936); the Tate Modern, whose contribution is Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937); and the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Belgium, the lender of The Temptation of St Anthony (1946).

The public will be able to view some thirty works which have never before been seen in Spain. Some of the most important are Partial Hallucination: Six Apparitions of Lenin on a Piano, 1931 (Centre Pompidou, Paris); The Angelus of Gala, 1935 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York); Bathers, c. 1928 (The Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida); Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, 1943 (The Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida), and Symbole agnostique (Agnostic Symbol), 1932 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia).

In the words of the curator Montse Aguer, this exhibition makes it possible for us to analyze Dalí’s artistic oeuvre and the different languages he employs, revealing his poetics to us. His finest work is not limited only to the invention of forms but also extends to poetic invention. In this respect, Dalí should be recognized as a leading renovator of the surrealist vocubulary, intensely committed to investigating the process of representing and interpreting what he observed and perceived.

CREDITS.-

Dates.- 27/04 > 2/09/2013.
Venue.- Museo Reina Sofía. [MAD] Spain. Building Sabatini. 3rd floor.
Organization.- Museo Reina Sofía and Centre Pompidue de París in collaboration with Salvador Dali Museum Saint Petersburg (Florida). Special collaboration with Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí.
General curator.- Jean-Hubert Martin.
Curators.- Montse Aguer, Jean-Michel Bouhours and Thierry Dufrêne.
Coordinator.- Aurora Rabanal.