Salvador Dalí

SALVADOR DALÍ I DOMÉNECH (Figueras, Girona, 1904 - 1989).
"The Surrealist King".1971.
Lithograph, copy E/A.
Signed and justified in pencil.
Measurements: 52,5 x 41 cm; 78,5 x 56 cm (frame).

The lithograph entitled "Surrealist King" by Salvador Dalí is a work that masterfully condenses the symbolic, political and dreamlike universe of the Catalan artist, displaying his unmistakable visual language through a set of images loaded with historical, biological and metaphysical references. In the center of the composition stands a faceless anthropomorphic figure, clad with the Francoist coat of arms of Spain as a pectoral, over which flies the national flag. The absence of a face has been replaced by a rocky oval, on which rests a starfish, a recurring element in Dalí's iconography, which here may allude both to the mutable nature of identity and to the fusion between the organic and the mineral. This featureless face defines the "surrealist king" as an impersonal, symbolic entity, transfigured into a marine and cosmic creature. Under the national coat of arms, the torso of the character becomes a sort of showcase or display box, containing a series of marine serpulids arranged on a dark background, creating a disturbing parallelism between the viscera of the human body and the abyssal fauna. This visual resource can be interpreted as a metaphor of the subconscious. In the margins of the image appear figures that evoke the iconography of Don Quixote as well as that of the circus or the theater. They introduce a subtle narrative dimension that dialogues with the historical and personal drama implicit in the work.

During his early years, Dalí discovered contemporary painting during a family visit to Cadaqués, where he met the family of Ramon Pichot, an artist who regularly traveled to Paris. Following Pichot's advice, Dalí began to study painting with Juan Núñez. In 1922, Dalí stayed at the famous Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid to begin studying Fine Arts at the San Fernando Academy. However, before his final exams in 1926, he was expelled for claiming that there was no one there fit to examine him. That same year Dalí traveled to Paris for the first time. There he met Picasso, and established some formal characteristics that would become distinctive of all his work from then on. During this period, Dalí held regular exhibitions in both Barcelona and Paris, and joined the surrealist group based in the Parisian neighborhood of Montparnasse. The painter landed in America in 1934, thanks to art dealer Julian Levy. As a result of his first individual exhibition in New York, his international projection was definitively consolidated, and since then he has been showing his work and giving lectures all over the world. 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.