SALVADOR DALÍ

Salvador Dali was born in Figueras (Spain) in 1904. Between 1921 and 1925 he studied at the San Fernando Academy in Madrid where he became friends with the poet Federico García Lorca and filmmaker Buñuel. In 1925 the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona organized his first personal exhibition, exhibition in

which Picasso and Miró were interested in his work.

In April 1926 Dalí first traveled to Paris where

he visited Picasso.

On his second trip to Paris in 1929, Dalí met Gala, his future wife and muse. He joined to the Surrealist movement in the same year. At that period of time, he painted dreamlike phantasmagorical places, which were populated with symbolic elements: soft watches, crutches, fantastic animals, twisted characters.

In the 40´s he said that he wanted to get close to reality and back to a more classic pictorial expression, but his work kept his personal fantasy.

The recurrent themes,in both the painted and the engraving works, were: women, sex, religion, battles. After ten years of efforts, Dalí opened his own museum in 1974.

Finally, he died in Figueras (Spain) in 1989.

His more famous paintings:

Portrait of My Father (1925) The Enigma of Desire (1929) The Great Masturbator (1929) The Persistence of Memory (1931) Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937) Geopolitical Child Watching the Birth of

the New Man (1943) The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946) La Madonna de Port Lligat (1950) La Toile Daligram (1972)

The Swallows’s Tail (1983)