Coinciding with the celebration of the centenary of surrealism, Setdart presents 5 monumental sculptures of one of its greatest exponents, Salvador Dalí.
On October 15, Surrealism turned 100 years old and, today, it remains one of the most decisive and fascinating movements of the twentieth century. Precisely on that same day in 1924, the first surrealist manifesto was published by the French poet André Breton, which marked the official birth of a movement that has left an everlasting mark in all cultural spheres.
The context of deep crisis in which Europe was plunged after the war of the First World War was the seed from which was born the need, on the part of artists and intellectuals of the time, to find new forms of expression in accordance with the world. In response to this crisis, surrealism also attacked the dominant rationalist trend, whose The aspiration to understand the world, through a set of laws, was no longer able to represent and explain, in all its complexity, human experience and behavior.
In fact, the challenge to logic and reality, which they championed then, is still, and perhaps more than ever, as necessary and stimulating as it was in its origins, challenging and inviting us to question and rethink the way we understand art, the human mind and, ultimately, the world around us.
As it could not be otherwise, if we talk about surrealism, we must talk about Salvador Dalí, who, with his eccentric personality, and his dreamlike and intriguing images, invites us to explore the most disconcerting and hidden aspects of human existence.
Sculptures under bidding, made in lost-wax bronze, based on models that Dalí created with his own hands in the 1970s, are part of the limited reissue, with only 6 copies, of the Isidre Clot collection, consisting of 44 statues, which the gallery owner and close friend of the artist commissioned from him. The 5 copies later distributed by the Diejasa Foundation, which Clot himself directed, materialize the creative maturity that the genius from Empordà reached. In them, the themes that disturbed and excited the curiosity of the master throughout his life are revealed, and whose iconography is already, in itself, a symbol of the surrealist movement.
Lot 35360791
The rereading of classical statuary and Greek mythology, the Freudian concept of the elasticity of time or the idea of twins as a symbol of physical and psychic splitting are just some of the themes through which Dalí plunges us fully into the swampy territory of the human psyche, where our hidden desires, contradictions, obsessions and memories, like his own, find a space in which to manifest themselves in a genuine way, without the impediments imposed by reason.
In a world where the impact of the virtual is increasingly present in our lives, blurring the boundaries between the real and the fictitious, what you see and what really is, it seems that Dalí and surrealism make more sense than ever. A symptom of this is the fascination that, after a century, is still capable of arousing not only in the art world, but in society as a whole. The auction of this monumental sculptural ensemble is therefore an event of total relevance for all those collectors who are passionate about the unique and incomparable universe that the genius of Figueras gave birth to.
