Le Surréalisme, c’est moi!

Labeled as an eccentric, a madman, and a pure genius, Salvador Dalí, with his oeuvre and provocative manner, did away with the boundaries between art and life, originality and commercialism as nearly no other twentieth-century artist did. He gave form to his vision of Surrealism as the aesthetic synthesis of dreams and reality in practically all forms of art media, but also via the way he presented his own self to the world. This exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wien reassesses Dalí’s controversially perceived output in relation to present-day art.

Salvador Dalí, The Eye, 1945

Salvador Dalí, Flores Surrealistas, 1938

Dalí was one of the very first artists to devote himself to design, cinema, and the entirety of mass media, while also practicing marketing strategies that have become primarily associated with Andy Warhol. He regarded Surrealism as a way of living, and occupied himself in almost every field of cultural production. He designed stage sets, perfume bottles and jewelry, worked with filmakers such as Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney, shot commercials, appeared in TV shows, and even made his paintings available to the covers Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Country House. Dalí made scores of varied roles his own and even cultivated his personal appearance to the point that it became something of a trademark and, later on, a caricature.

The exhibition highlights approximately seventy selected works by Salvador Dalí, which are juxtapositioned against internationally acclaimed pieces by Louise Bourgeois, Glenn Brown, Markus Schinwald and Francesco Vezzoli. Paintings, sculptures, drawings, films, and video works explore the visual worlds of the unconscious, the history of art and the tradition of painting, the phenomenon of celebrity, and the role of art and the artist in society and popular culture.