EXHIBITION RECORD

Fruits and Flowers: Dalí’s Botanical Prints

April 6 – May 28, 2006

Salvador Dalí spent his life finding inspiration in the works of others, copying artistic techniques and following new schools of thought, and incorporating everything into his own work. From the earliest works in his lifelong oeuvre, Dalí emulated other artists’ styles, themes, and subject matter, often making copies of works from books for later study. After finding his own personal “style” (and modifying it often as time progressed), his superb skills as a draftsman enabled him to duplicate any pieces of work that he set his hand to.

Although Dalí had used elements of college in his works beginning in the mid 1920s, and made various assemblages of objects in the early 1930s, it was not until the late 1930s that he began to work directly over existing works by other artists – photographs, posters, advertisements, and magazines. In his prodigious output of printed multiples, Dalí would often use “cut and paste” techniques to include previously printed images into his mixed-media creations, as well as use entire images that he would alter (FlorDalí – Les Fruits), and also would use existing images as a guide for making his own copies (FlorDalí).

In addition to using a variety of techniques, Dalí also reused many iconic images throughout his work, among them flies, ants, clocks, eyes, rocks, and beans. The use of perspective lines to create a dramatic focal point and/or horizon line has also been employed by the artist, often giving the primary image in the work a position of great importance as it seemingly hovers over the figures below. Dalí also depicts figures in his works with gross physical abnormalities and often creates tableaux filled with tension, mystery, and unease. He does this quite successfully in these suites as well. Most importantly, these prints would never have been created without the process that Dalí called “paranoiac-critical” thought, where he allows his mind’s eye to “create” secondary images.