Salvador Dalí

SALVADOR DALÍ I DOMÈNECH (Figueras, Girona, 1904–1989).
"Gala Gradiva," 1970.
In silver with a marble base.
Signed and numbered. Copy 100/100.
Measurements: 41.5 x 20 x 17.5 cm.

In this work, Dalí pays tribute to Gala, his iconic wife, muse, and collaborator, depicting her in a stylized manner as she walks.

The artist himself noted this when he wrote: “I call my wife: Gala, Galuchka, Gradiva… because she has been my Gradiva, the one who moves forward so beautifully, my victory, my wife.”

The sculpture is part of historic collections and limited-edition bronze casts (such as the renowned Clot Collection). Replicas and copies of this piece are on permanent public display at iconic locations such as Avenida del Mar in Marbella, Spain.

To understand the importance and uniqueness of Isidro Clot’s sculpture collection—to which the work up for auction belongs—one must visit Salvador Dalí and Gala’s summer home in Port Lligat, Spain. It was 1971 when the master surrealist—already advanced in age but still in full possession of his faculties—began sculpting a series of 50 small and inspiring wax sculptures. The figures were modeled under the blazing Mediterranean sun, which made the wax soft and malleable, leaving the delicate fingerprints of the master from Figueras imprinted on the surface. Robert Descharnes, a friend and renowned Dalí expert, describes the process of creating the sculptures in his book *Dalí: The Hard and the Soft Spells for the Magic of Form: Sculptures and Objects*: “As a friend of the couple, I was able to sit beside Dalí, chatting nonstop while his hands created the pieces in the collection. For this sculptural work, Dalí adopted a ritual: a specific hour of the day outside his studio, preferably in the sun. So, every afternoon, after noon, Dalí would put down his paintbrush and leave the studio to head to the pool. There, comfortably settled in the hollow of a huge sack of beans, Dalí would mold and shape until it was time to meet Gala for grilled fish for lunch.” In 1973, 44 sculptures he had created up to that point were cast in bronze by his friend Isidro Clot, who ran the Diejasa foundry together with his son-in-law Adrián Campos. Dalí closely supervised the casting process—a crucial detail that makes the piece on offer an original by the master from Port Lligat.

A painter and sculptor, Salvador Dalí was one of the leading figures of the Surrealist movement. He held his first solo exhibition in 1925 at the Dalmau Galleries in Barcelona. In 1926, after being expelled from the San Fernando School of Fine Arts for indiscipline, he left for Paris. There he met the young Picasso, and four years later, he joined the Surrealist movement. Dalí’s work during this period was based on Freud’s theories, which were championed by Breton: the depiction of dreamlike images and everyday objects in unexpected and surprising compositional forms. Some of the characteristics of his work from this time became hallmarks of his entire later body of work. He also absorbed influences from various artistic styles, ranging from classical academicism to the most groundbreaking avant-garde movements. His work had an enormous influence on the direction of Surrealism in the years that followed, and he was hailed as the creator of the paranoid-critical method—an essential fusion of the real and the imaginary. Following his first solo exhibition in New York in 1934, his international reputation was definitively established. Most of his body of work is housed at the Dalí Theater-Museum in Figueras, followed by the collections at 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), and the Dalí Universe in London.