Salvador Dalí

Although best known for his virtuosity and imagination as a Surrealist painter, Salvador Dalí had an extraordinarily varied practice that included drawing, sculpture, theatrical design, fashion collaborations, print advertising, film, and more.

Born in Catalonia, Spain, a regional identity he proudly asserted throughout his life, Dalí moved to Madrid to study at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1922. He first traveled to Paris in 1926, where he encountered the artistic movement known as Surrealism, which sought to provoke and explore the boundaries of consciousness. In one of his most iconic works, Venus de Milo with Drawers, Dalí added drawers to a half-size plaster reproduction of a famous marble statue of the Roman goddess of love, an embodiment of Sigmund Freud’s “discover[y] that the human body is full of secret drawers, that only psychoanalysis is capable of opening.” While Dalí helped shape the Surrealist movement, his relationship with its primary proponents became increasingly conflicted in the 1930s, a period in which he declared, “I myself am Surrealism!” Later in life, Dalí’s work focused on his interest in science and religion, while retaining a Surrealist fondness for challenging everyday norms through unconventional imagery set within imaginative pictorial space.

Dalí’s 1937 painting, Invention of the Monsters, typifies the artist’s signature mode of Surrealism while expressing anxieties surrounding the Spanish Civil War. When the work was acquired in 1943, Dalí wrote a letter to the Art Institute expressing his satisfaction that the work had come to Chicago and underscoring the “prophetic character” of the painting with reference to the political climate of Europe in the 1930s culminating in World War II.

The Art Institute of Chicago has a collection of 40 works by Salvador Dalí, including paintings, drawings, prints, objects, and textiles. Among these are some of the most representative works of his paranoiac-critical method—in which Dalí intentionally entered a paranoid state to tap into his subconscious—such as the painting Chemist Lifting with Extreme Precaution The Cuticle of a Grand Piano. In 2023, the Art Institute of Chicago presented its first solo exhibition dedicated to the artist, Salvador Dalí: The Image Disappears.