Salvador Dalí

SALVADOR DALÍ I DOMÈNECH (Figueras, Girona, 1904 - 1989).
"Female nude".
Pencil drawing on paper.
Signed in the lower margin.
Attached certificate of Robert Descharnes.
Measurements: 17 x 13,5 cm; 49 x 45 cm (frame).

Original erotic drawing by Dalí. The nude female figure, resolved with a dynamic and gestural stroke, reveals the immediacy of Dalí's erotic thought: not so much a narrative scene as an epiphany of desire, captured in an instant of creative impulse. This type of work, which Dalí cultivated throughout his career, from the surrealist years to his late experiments, summarizes his conviction that art and eroticism are parallel expressions of the unconscious, where the line is literally the trace of desire.

Eroticism occupies an essential and constant place in Dalí's work, both as an iconographic theme and as a creative impulse. From his early years at the Residencia de Estudiantes, Dalí manifested a deep fascination for sensuality, desire and the human body, which he always interpreted from a psychoanalytical, symbolic and deeply personal perspective.

Influenced by Freudian theories on the unconscious and sexuality, the genius from Empordà understood eroticism not as a mere visual motif, but as an engine of artistic impulse, a way of accessing the deepest mechanisms of the mind. In his surrealist production, the female body (fragmented, metamorphosed or idealized) appears as a metaphor of desire, obsession and transcendence.

In drawing, Dalí found a privileged means to express this erotic dimension with spontaneity and psychological precision. His line, always sure and elastic, combines the sensuality of the stroke with a formal elegance that transforms eroticism into an aesthetic act and mental gesture. In these works on paper, the artist dispenses with pictorial artifice to focus on the energy of desire, translated into the fluidity of graphics and the tension between insinuation and form.

Dalí's erotic drawing is characterized by a synthesis between the figurative and the dreamlike: he dominates the anatomy with ease, but subjects it to subtle deformations or ambiguous poses that intensify the sensation of movement and inner life. The female body, often isolated on the white background of the paper, becomes a symbol of inspiration and vertigo, of attraction and mystery.

Painter and sculptor, Salvador Dalí was one of the greatest exponents of the surrealist movement. He made his individual debut in 1925, at the Dalmau Galleries in Barcelona. In 1926, after being expelled from the San Fernando School of Fine Arts for indiscipline, he went to Paris. There he met the young Picasso and, four years later, he joined the surrealist movement. Dalí's production in this period is based on Freud's theories, acclaimed by Breton: representation of dreamlike images and everyday objects in unsuspected and surprising compositional forms. Some of the characteristics of his work at this time became distinctive of all his later work. He also absorbed the influences of diverse artistic styles, from classical academicism to the most groundbreaking avant-garde. His work greatly influenced the direction of surrealism during the following years, being acclaimed as the creator of the paranoiac-critical method, an essential combination of the real and the imaginary. As a result of his first individual exhibition in New York in 1934, his international projection was definitively consolidated. Most of his production is gathered in the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueras, followed by the collection of the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg (Florida), the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Salvador Dalí Gallery in Pacific Palisades (California), the Espace Dalí in Montmartre (Paris) or the Dalí Universe in London.