Salvador Dalí, life beyond the illusion – World

World – There are still a handful of days before the closure of the extraordinary exhibition that The Art Institute di Chicago dedicated to the master of surrealism. Salvador Dalí: The Image Disappears will close its doors in fact the June 12, 2023 after 4 months in which he garnered acclaim from critics and the overseas public by exhibiting over 50 paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, together with a rich selection of books and ephemera of the crucial decade – the one between the ’30 of the twentieth century – in which the master of Figueres emerged on the world scene as a true master of Surrealism.

According to many, an ‘unmissable’ exhibition, above all because it has shed light on two fundamental aspects – albeit in contradiction with each other – in the artist’s creative process: an immense desire for visibility and the desire to disappear.

Themes explored, in a different key and in a different historical period – that of twilight – in the film DALILAND directed by Canadian director Mary Harron and with an extraordinary Academy Award Ben Kingsley as the eccentric artist, which Plaion Pictures is bringing these days in Italian cinemas.

And so if the Chicago exhibition curated by Caitlin Haskell it’s yes Jennifer Cohen presents iconic works from the Art Institute’s Surrealist collections alongside extremely rare loans from leading public and private collections in Europe and the United States, exploring a series of “disappearing acts” undertaken by the artist at the height of his fame, to unveil with new eyes the genius of Salvador Dalí to the general public, similarly the biopic DALILAND leads us to discover how the greatest work is the artist’s life, with its thousand contradictions and idiosyncrasies. A film that guides the viewer into the mind of the artist for whom “Painting has no value until it disappears and turns into an illusion of reality”.

The lucky few of our readers who will be able to see live The Art Institute exhibition in Chicago will be able to appreciate the discovery work of the two American curators who, with new historical research and sophisticated technical analysis, have managed to reveal hidden images within the best known works of Dali including Visions of Eternity which the American museum decided to postdate 1936 to 1939 and rename with a new name, Untitled (Dream of Venus).

Revelations therefore that will continue to arouse curiosity about the Spanish artist and that while waiting to be shared also in Old Europe in some exhibition that is not only the re-proposition of the cliché in which Dalí is always restless, transgressive, eccentric and ingenious, they tell the most profound and unusual aspects. As indeed DALILAND knows how to do well, a biopic that challenges conventions to tell the story of the man behind the artist’s mask.

For more information:
DALILAND (2023)
from 25 May 2023 at Cinema
directed by Mary Harron
Cast Ben Kingsley, Barbara Sukowa, Ezra Miller, Christopher Briney
https://www.plaionpictures.it/film/daliland/

Salvador Dalí: The Image Disappears
until 12 June 2023
The Art Institute
111 South Michigan Avenue 
Chicago, Illinois (USA)
https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9713/salvador-dali-the-image-disappears