Salvador Dali in Merida

What do Pablo Picasso, Francisco de Goya, and Salvador Dalí have in common? Obviously, they were all Spanish artists. But what is not so obvious is that they have all had exhibits in Mérida during the past year.

What would Dalí think about that? Well, in his own words: “There are only two bad things which can happen to you in life. To be Pablo Picasso or not to be Salvador Dalí.”

Las Miradas del Sueño (Glances at the Dream) by Salvador Dalí is in Mérida from Jan. 23 to March 23, 2010, in the Centro Cultural Olimpo, marking the 21st anniversary of Dalí’s death on Jan. 23, 1989, of a heart attack at the age of 84. His body is buried in the crypt of the Teatro-Museo Dalí, in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, the city where he was born in 1904.

Art rebel, he was expelled from the Academia de Arte de San Fernando de Madrid and rapidly joined the surrealist movement. Always surrounded by scandal in the simulation and delirious creation of his own paranoid critical method, Dalí eventually broke with the surrealist movement and at the end of his life he dedicated himself to the experimentation of different techniques and currents, of which metaphysical hyperrealism and quantum realism stand out.

He has never been afraid to say what he thinks about himself:

“Every morning when I wake up I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí.”

“The most important thing is that they talk about you, even if they say good things.”

His acute intelligence carried him away to the paroxysm of simulation and the creation of violent paradoxes, with his own theories resonating in various books, declarations, and notebooks, where he recounted his own dreams, with capricious images that represented his internal personal world.

Included in this exhibition:

Graphic series: The Divine Comedy, Dante Seen by Dalí, 56 works. The Divine Comedy is a poem written in three parts by the Italian Dante Alighieri. Dante is guided by Virgil through the nine circles of the Inferno; atop the mountain of Purgatory where he meets Beatriz who takes him to Paradise. Dalí illustrated the poem with watercolors and wood engravings.

Graphic series: The Capricious Dreams of Pantagruel de Rabelais, 25 works. Dalí’s interest in illustrating, or rather in placing his own personal light, on the great compositions of universal literature, brings him to the creation of a series of lithographs, in 1973, of the classic by Rabelais Gargantúa y Pantagruel.

Graphic series: The Fables of La Fontaine, 12 works. Jean La Fontaine is one of the authors who actually enjoyed, during his lifetime, the knowledge that he would take his place in the history of writing. Salvador Dalí presents a portrait of La Fontaine which serves as a tribute of illustration of 11 of his fables.

Centro Cultural Olimpo

Calle 62 x 61 y 63, Plaza Grande

Tuesday-Sunday 10 am – 8 pm

Free Entry