Life ♥ walking on air: Surrealism: Salvador Dali

Busy Saturday~ It's considered a sorta hectic Saturday cause i've been doing almost nothing at home everyday. Went for the mighty Salvador Dali's artwork exhibition [lead crystal display] organised by Soka Gakai Malaysia [SGM] at Wisma Kebudayaan SGM itself. According to Mr Soh, this organisation is damn rich to own such a huge building in KL area xD But well, free admission =) Oh, thanks to Mr Soh for the ride and Sim for her companionship(?) =)

GPS is useful =D

Jalan Bukit Bintang, KL.

Biography of Salvador Dali:

Dalí, Salvador (1904-89): Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer. After passing through phases of Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting, he joined the Surrealists in 1929 and his talent for self-publicity rapidly made him the most famous representative of the movement. Throughout his life he cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism (one of his most famous acts was appearing in a diving suit at the opening of the London Surrealist exhibition in 1936), claiming that this was the source of his creative energy. He took over the Surrealist theory of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method which he named `critical paranoia'. According to this theory one should cultivate genuine delusion as in clinical paranoia while remaining residually aware at the back of one's mind that the control of the reason and will has been deliberately suspended. He claimed that this method should be used not only in artistic and poetical creation but also in the affairs of daily life. His paintings employed a meticulous academic technique that was contradicted by the unreal `dream' space he depicted and by the strangely hallucinatory characters of his imagery. He described his pictures as `hand-painted dream photographs' and had certain favorite and recurring images, such as the human figure with half-open drawers protruding from it, burning giraffes, and watches bent and flowing as if made from melting wax (The Persistence of Memory, MOMA, New York; 1931).

In 1937 Dalí visited Italy and adopted a more traditional style; this together with his political views (he was a supporter of General Franco) led Breton to expel him from the Surrealist ranks. He moved to the USA in 1940 and remained there until 1955. During this time he devoted himself largely to self-publicity; his paintings were often on religious themes (The Crucifixion of St John of the Cross, Glasgow Art Gallery, 1951), although sexual subjects and pictures centring on his wife Gala were also continuing preoccupations. In 1955 he returned to Spain and in old age became a recluse.

Apart from painting, Dalí's output included sculpture, book illustration, jewellery design, and work for the theatre. In collaboration with the director Luis Buñuel he also made the first Surrealist films---Un chien andalou (1929) and L'Age d'or (1930)---and he contributed a dream sequence to Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). He also wrote a novel, Hidden Faces (1944) and several volumes of flamboyant autobiography. Although he is undoubtedly one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, his status is controversial; many critics consider that he did little if anything of consequence after his classic Surrealist works of the 1930s. There are museums devoted to Dalí's work in Figueras, his home town in Spain, and in St Petersburg in Florida.

Here are some of his artwork presented in the exhibition:

The most well-known: The melted clocks.

The well-known surrealist piece introduced the image of the soft melting pocket watch. It epitomizes Dalí's theory of "softness" and "hardness", which was central to his thinking at the time. As Dawn Ades wrote, "The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order".This interpretation suggests that Dalí was incorporating an understanding of the world introduced by Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. When asked by Ilya Prigogine whether this was in fact the case, Dali replied that the soft watches were not inspired by the theory of relativity, but by the surrealist perception of a Camembert cheese melting in the sun.

Although fundamentally part of Dalí's Freudian phase, the imagery precedes his transition to his scientific phase by fourteen years, which occurred after the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

It is possible to recognize a human figure in the middle of the composition, in the strange "monster" that Dalí used in several period pieces to represent himself – the abstract form becoming something of a self portrait, reappearing frequently in his work. The orange clock at the bottom left of the painting is covered in ants. Dalí often used ants in his paintings as a symbol for death, as well as a symbol of female genitalia.

The figure in the middle of the picture is symbolized as a "fading" creature, as which, when one often dreams, he or she cannot pin-point the exact form and composition of a creature. One can also see that the creature has one closed eye with several eyelashes; this also suggests that the creature is in a dream state. The iconography of this famous painting is that of a dream that Dalí had experienced. The clocks symbolize the passing of time that one experiences in a dream state.

Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach

Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938) is a painting by the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali.

The picture shows a fruit on or in a wine glass. A human face (which would be seen again in one of Dalí's later works, The Endless Enigma) is seen below the fruit, the handle of the wine glass acting as the face's nose bridge. The texture of the face is the sand of the beach. On the sand is a cloth and a snapped rope. There also are 2 dogs featured in the background of the painting.

The painting is currently on display at the Wadsworth Atheneum In Hartford Connecticut.

Giving birth of a blind horse biting a telephone.

Here are some quotes by him too:

"Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it."
"At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since."
"The only difference between me and a madman is I'm not mad."
"Intelligence with out ambition is a bird without wings."
"Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating: It is either good or bad. "

There were some other exhibitions going on on the other floors.

This was on the ninth floor, SGM Mentor & Disciple Peace Hall.

Well, very informative afternoon. Got to know a lot about Soka Gakai Malaysia and it's president at present, Mr Daisaku Ikeda too. He's is a great man! =D