"The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels - it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant."
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) is the defining figure of Surrealism and one of the most technically accomplished and intellectually restless artists of the twentieth century. Born in Figueres, Catalonia, he demonstrated an exceptional facility for draughtsmanship from childhood, and by his early twenties had absorbed - and largely exhausted - Impressionism, Cubism, and Futurism before arriving at the movement that would make his name and reshape modern art.
Dalí formally joined the Paris Surrealists in 1929, bringing with him a method entirely his own: the paranoid-critical method, a self-induced hallucinatory state through which he unlocked the imagery of the unconscious and rendered it with the meticulous precision of a Renaissance master. The tension between the dreamlike and the hyper-real - chaos held in perfect technical control - became his signature and remains unmistakable. The Persistence of Memory (1931), with its dissolving watches suspended in an eerily still Catalan landscape, is perhaps the most recognised image in twentieth-century art.
His output was extraordinary in both volume and range. Alongside his painting he produced sculpture, jewellery, film - most famously his collaborations with Luis Buñuel - theatre design, and a body of graphic work in printmaking that stands as one of the most significant of the century. His series of illustrated literary suites, including works drawn from Dante, Cervantes, and Lewis Carroll, demonstrated that his engagement with the intaglio process was not peripheral but central to his practice. He brought the same visual intelligence and psychological intensity to the etching plate that he applied to canvas.
His life was inseparable from his myth. The waxed moustache, the theatrical pronouncements, the ostentatious persona - all were, in part, a calculated extension of the art itself. His relationship with his wife and muse Gala, whom he met in 1929 and married in 1934, was the enduring constant of his personal and creative life. He spent his final years in the castle he had gifted to her, and died in Figueres in 1989 - three blocks from where he was born, buried beneath the Teatro-Museo Dalí he had spent decades designing as his ultimate work.
His works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; the Reina Sofía, Madrid; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; and the Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida, among many others.