Salvador Dali

Catalan painter (1904-1989), he is renowned for his surrealist work. His pictorial work grabs attention for the unique combination of bizarre images, like in the dreaming, with an academic technique, traditional, similar to the Renascence artists. Dali also executed interesting contributions in the theatre, fashion, photography, cinema (having worked with the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock), commercials, and even the field of design, creating product logos. Dali demonstrated interest in the plastic arts very early. He initiated his artistic schooling at the Escola de Desenho Municipal de Figueres. In 1916, he discovered the impressionist painting. His first artworks, framed in a meticulous and naturalist line, already produced an ambiguous sensation of unreality that would intensify later on. In 1921, he got into the Escola de Belas Artes de São Fernando, in Madrid, but he was expelled of the institution in 1923, under the accusation of leading a student protest. In his paintings he experimented with Cubism and Dadaism. In 1928, persuaded by Miró, he transferred to Paris and joined the surrealist movement. In the early 30’s, Dali found his own style, his particular language and way of expressing himself that always accompanied him and, even though shifting and evolving, it would be at the bottom, what would ultimately define him: a mixture between art and tradition. In 1939 he was expelled from the surrealist movement, because his political orientations were contrary to the ones from the founder, André Breton. With the burst of the Spanish Civil War, Dali sought refuge in the United States of América, marking this period a shift in his work: after the World War II, his works started to imitate the Renascence classicism.

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