Salvador Dalí

Exhibition at the Centro Cultural do Banco do Brasil

The Salvador Dalí exhibition is the largest anthological exhibition of the artist's work ever held in the country. It includes a total amount of 220 pieces: 164 works of art and 56 documents.

The Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Salvador Dalí Museum of Saint Petersburg (Florida), with the collaboration of the Tomie Ohtake Institute, have organized the largest exhibition on the artist to date staged in Latin America. More specifically, in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, in Brazil, at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro from 29 May to 22 September 2014, and to the Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo, from 17 October until the end of the year.

The Salvador Dalí exhibition is the largest anthological exhibition of the artist's work ever held in the country. It includes a total amount of 220 pieces: 164 works of art and 56 documents, It consist of an overview of works from all periods, though with particular emphasis on the surrealist period.

The Dalí Foundation wishes thus to meet some of its founding objectives: to promote, disseminate and enhance prestige both within Spain and abroad to the painter's artistic and intellectual work.

Starting out from this premise, the technical teams of the three largest collections of Salvador Dalí's work have planned an exhibition that presents an exhaustive overview of Dalí's production from the 1920s down to his last canvases. It offers visitors the chance to appreciate not only the artist's technical evolution, but also his influences and his ideological and iconographic referents, thus offering the ever-enriching contemplation of the artist's original universe.

This major retrospective includes many documentary pieces that accompany the paintings exhibited. The documents, all of them from the files of the Centre for Dalinian Studies, reinforce the dialogue established between the paintings presented, while they also allow a biographical and artistic tour to be undertaken of the artist's trajectory. Of them, we might highlight two books in which he collaborated actively by creating the frontispiece of both of them, namely L'Immaculée conception by André Breton and Paul Éluard dating from 1930, and Onan by Georges Hugnet from 1934. The painter's incursion into the world of silver screen is completed by a showing of Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound (1945), whose dream sequences were designed by Salvador Dalí.

This exhibition offers an overview that helps to understand Dalí in all his facets: as painter, draftsman, thinker, writer, enthusiast of science, a catalyst of vanguard currents, illustrator, designer, cineaste, set designer. But it also shows him as a non-conformist in his own way, capable of perceiving the growing importance of mass culture, and, obviously, as an all-round artist, experimenting in all fields of creation, even the most innovative ones such as installations and performances.

This exhibition has the invaluable collaboration of the Tomie Ohtake Institute, the sponsorship of Arteris (Abertis subsidiary in Brazil), Banco do Brasil, IRB, MAPFRE, Telefónica, and the support of Atento, Brasilcap and Prosegur.