Salvador Dalì

Salvador Dalì was born in 1904 in Figueres, Catalonia, and has been one of the greatest artists of XX century. Always curious and interested in expanding his work in more than just one field, he has been a painter, a sculptor, a screenwriter, film director, set designer, photographer and last but not least, he had a great talent for drawing, that gave him the opportunity to experiment with traditional printing techniques such as screenprint and lithography.

He studied art at the Real Academia de Belles Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, where he met poet Federico García Lorca and film director Luis Buñuel. With Buñuel Dalì will worked at the 1929 surrealist manifesto movie Un chien andalou and the next year at L'age d'or; with Lorca he worked with as a playwriter.

Dalì’s first solo exhibition was in 1925 at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcellona, and the next year he visited Paris for the first time: it was an obligatory travel for every artist who wanted to know what was happening in the art world, since Paris was the beating heart of the avant-gard movements. In Paris he met Pablo Picasso, already recognized as a master at the time.

In 1929 he met Gala, his future wife, love of his life and art muse.

Dalì has been among the most famous, but also criticized surrealist artists, the movement founded in Paris in 1924 by poet André Breton, who published its Manifestothat same year. Surrealism gave great prominence to the subconscious (inspired by Freud’s studies) and dreams, viewed as the natural expressions of subconscious. Dalì got close to them in 1930 when the surrealist group was working in Montmartre, and he worked with them for a few years, creating many of his most known masterpieces.

He has been one of the most famous and talented artists of Breton’s group: in 1931 he invented the so-called “surrealist object with a symbolic function”, and explained their meaning in a piece of writing published in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution; from 1933 he published articles and photocollages in Minotaure, another important avant-garde Parisian art magazine.

In 1934 there was his solo exhibition of paintings at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, which confirmed his success outside of Europe too.

In 1939 Dalì stopped working with the Surrealist group, breaking both the work and intellectual relationship he had with Breton and the other, because their ideas had come to collision one too many times during the previous years. He then moved to New York with Gala.

Dalì is often celebrated as a painter –as it should be,- but he has also created incredible art prints. His great knowledge and ability at drawing was perfect for this type of artworks, and he made a great number of prints. Among his series there are the illustrations for Les Chantes de Maldoror, for the Divine Comedy and for the Apocalypse by Saint John.