Exhibitions - Previous Exhibitions - Salvador Dali

Following the enormous success of the Eric Gill exhibition The Gascoigne gallery are especially thrilled and excited to be showing the work of a further significant international artist, the infamous Salvador Dali.

Salvador Dali (1904-1989) the Catalan, Surrealist artist was a prolific printmaker with an output of at least 1700 prints during an artistic career spanning more than sixty years. He was undoubtedly one of the finest graphics artists of the 20 th century and amongst the principal printmaking techniques he used were drypoint, etching, woodcut and lithography.

To these techniques Dali sometimes added his own idiosyncratic but innovative and spontaneous graphic experiments. For example he made tachiste plates (irregular dabs or splotches of colour) by blasting them with explosive charges. On other occasions he attacked the plates with ???? or bombarded them with eggs containing lithographic ink. Some of his drypoints were produced with his 'dessin automatique' (automatic drawing technique where the artist believed his hand movements were controlled by his subconscious mind.

Dali began to study at the Royal Academy of Art in Madrid. He owed little to his professors at the School in any case and vigorously promoted the notion that he had been born a prodigy. He was expelled twice and never took the final examinations. His opinion was that he was more qualified than those who should have examined him.

By 1929 Dali had found his personal style that should make him famous - the world of the unconscious that is recalled during our dreams. The surrealist theory is based on the theories of the psychologist Dr. Sigmund Freud. Recurring images of burning giraffes and melting watches became the artist's surrealist trademarks. His great craftsmanship allowed him to execute his paintings in a nearly photorealistic style. Unlike the sentimental painters who represent dreams as misty and delicate Dali shows them hard and as severely realistic in surface as dreams often are..Dali does not permit the dream to dissolve; his pictures are, as it were, frozen nightmares.