Dali Galatea of the Spheres 60 x 80 cm art print

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In reality, both the smallest and largest aspects of the visible creation are designed along similar principles. This is most apparent in the organisation of atomic particles and galaxies. Both of their structures involve spheres, maintaining precise orbits and spatial distribution. It is almost as if an atom contains its own miniature universe.

Galatea of the spheresis a piece Dali created depicting his wife Gala Dali within a series of spheres. During this time Dali had been experimenting with scientific theories and his own passion for the sciences. Inspired by Heisenberg, and thinking ‘ today, the exterior world —the physical one— has gone beyond the psychological one ‘– shows how much deeper into reality Dali was thinking than just what was on the surface. I will be exploring this piece of art as a whole but also trying to piece together the underlying concepts. As with earlier Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Swans Reflecting Elephants uses the reflection in a lake to create the double image seen in the painting. In Metamorphosis, the reflection of

Here are five famous Salvador Dalí paintings you should know.

The visual centre of the painting directs us, not toward Gala's eyes (which are closed) but to her mouth. (He would have kissed this mouth many times and it was a mouth that would have soothed him with comforting words. Despite criticism levelled at her, she did prove to be a stabilising influence to Salvador.) From her mouth, flows a perfect procession of infinite spheres, being replicated like cells in living tissue.

This work marks the beginning of a move in focus both through artistic imagery and in Dalí's conversion to Catholicism. According McGirk, "slowly Dalí's mysticism took form, and the shape it assumed was Gala. He painted her as the Madonna of Port Lligat, in angelic levitation above the fishermen in their boats on the sea. There was no change in Gala's behaviour to warrant this idealization - she was still the prowling seductress of young men, the arrogant and ruthless keeper of Dalí. It was not as though Gala necessarily inspired his epiphany ". Dalí wished for this painting to be displayed on an easel, which had been owned by French painter Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, in a suite of three rooms called the Palace of the Winds (named for the tramontana) in the Dalí Theatre and Museum in Figueres. [1] It remains on display there. It was transported to and exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 2009, along with many other Dalí paintings in the Liquid Desire exhibition. [4] See also [ edit ] breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of autostrangulation." The desecration of the human body was a great preoccupation of the Surrealists in general, and of Dali in particular.Years later, having almost single-handedly engineered her husband's fame, Gala wanted to ensure that no one could gain access to their fortune. When the couple returned to Spain in 1958, they remarried in a religious ceremony because, having been married previously in a civil ceremony, the law dictated that if Gala were to divorce Dalí, or the painter were to die, his family would be legal heirs to his fortune. In the Surrealist period, I wanted to create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the exterior world and that of physics has transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg.” away to Paris, where they actually got married. Dali and Gala had hired an escort to take them safely to Paris, but the escort died on his return because of the stresses of the Spanish Civil War. When Dali had finally returned

In 1929 Salvador Dalí met Gala, the woman who would become his wife, muse, agent and collaborator. He was young, only 25, and just starting out as an artist. She was 35 and married with a child. In early photos, Salvador Dalí could almost be mistaken for Gala’s child. But over time, the balance shifted. He aged dramatically, growing puffier, rheumier and more ludicrous by the year. She, by contrast, was a glacier: unchanging, coolly elegant. People sniped that there was something vampiric about their 53-year relationship. Salvador Dalí, “One Second Before Awakening from a Dream Provoked by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate” (1944) Dalí wished for this painting to be displayed on an easel, which had been owned by French painter Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, in a suite of three rooms called the Palace of the Winds (named for the tramontana) in the Dalí Theatre and Museum in Figueres. It remains on display there to this day. It was transported to and exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 2009, along with many other Dalí paintings in the Liquid Desire exhibition. One of the most representative works from the nuclear mysticism period. It is the outcome of a Dalí impassioned by science and for the theories of the disintegration of the atom. Gala’s face is made up from a discontinuous, fragmented setting, densely populated by spheres, which on the axis of the canvas takes on a prodigious three-dimensional vision and perspective. As Dalí clarified in his Anti-Matter Manifesto: “Today, the exterior world —the physical one— has gone beyond the psychological one. My father, today, is Doctor Heisenberg”. It is one of the most eloquent acts of homage to Gala’s face that Dalí produced, and he wanted it to be seen in the Palace of Winds in his Theatre-Museum, on an easel that had belonged to Meissonier, a painter of whom there are two works in the museum that formed part of Dalí’s private collection. While he may or may not have known of his wife's need for surgery, Dalí would have certainly been aware of her history of poor health. At the same time, the painting providing visual proof of Dalí's obsession with Gala's body and his own sexual anxiety and impotence. This aspect is echoed here by the shadow of the figure who is barely visible on the right side of the canvas but which represents the artist as voyeur. The surgery (the hysterectomy) itself had a profound impact on Gala. She had never fostered a nurturing relationship with her only child, Cecile, a daughter with first husband Paul Éluard, and the surgery left her unable to bear children with Dalí. McGirk states how the tumour's "removal was an especially barbarous procedure, and when Gala described the operation to a friend nearly forty years later the experience was still so painful in her mind that she cried. The doctors, she said had 'emptied' her ".Simultaneously muse, model, artist, businesswoman, writer and fashion icon, Gala has long been treated as a cipher by art historians, but thanks to the new Barcelona exhibition, she is finally emerging as a singular individual connected with—but not dependent on—the male surrealists who surrounded her. Dalí worshipped Gala – she was his muse and the love of his life. He painted her frequently, often in religious contexts, like Virgin Mary in The Madonna of Port Lligat. Galatea of the Spheres is one of the many portraits Dalí did of his wife, in this instance depicting her head and shoulders as fragmented into spheres that seem to float in space. Salvador Dalí – Galatea of the Spheres (1952), oil on canvas This painting is based on Piero della Francesca’s “Madonna and Child with Angels and Six Saints”, with Gala as Madonna. No one could describe Gala as virginal, or maternal for that matter. She neglected the child she’d had with her first husband, the French poet Paul Eluard (she had no children with Dalí and had to have a hysterectomy in 1936 due to complications with uterine fibroids). Still, Dalí often tried to reconcile his art and lifestyle with his Catholicism. He took this painting along to an audience with Pope Pius XII, who was apparently rather taken with it. Salvador and Gala has to get special dispensation from the Pope to marry because of Gala’s previous marriage. In 1934 Dalí's painted Portrait of Gala with Two Lamb Chops in Equilibrium Upon Her Shoulder in which his wife is shown against a surrealist landscape with her eyes closed and two lamb chops placed on her shoulders. This was one of the numerous portraits Dalí painted of Gala over his career though here Dalí's thinking is at its most oblique. McGirk's reading of the painting seems highly plausible, however, when he suggested it might have "represented his misplaced desire to cannibalise Gala "; that is, to be able to completely "consume" his wife. Certainly, Gala was exerting a hypnotic-like influence over her husband.

Gala wasn’t popular among Dalì’s cohorts. She was formidable, spiteful, and had a nasty temper. Critics paint her as a monster muse, obsessed with money over integrity. They blamed her when Dalì’s art seemed to suffer critically and become over-commercialized.

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Dalí i Domènech, Salvador Galatea of the Spheres Date 1952 Technique Oil on canvas Dimensions 65 x 54 cm Location Dalí Theatre-Museum The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning,” Dalí once said. “On the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent, and involuntary that it escapes the more simple analysis of logical intuition.” Theirs was an open and bizarre marriage. Gala was sexually voracious and had many affairs, including with her ex husband Éluard. Letters to Gala is the published version of Éluard’s raw and twisted letters to Gala, which expose the powerful grip she held over him .