o   Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire is the first comprehensive retrospective of the work of Salvador Dalí ever to be staged in Australia.

o   The exhibition is drawn from the holdings of the two largest collections of Dalí in the world:

      - the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí in Figueres, Spain;
      - and the Salvador Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, Florida

o   A full retrospective, the exhibition will comprise of more than 200 works in all media including painting, drawing, watercolour, etchings, jewellery, sculpture, fashion, cinema and photography.

o   It will trace the genius of Dalí from his earliest years as a 14-year-old, to the final paintings created when the artist was in his seventies.

o   From his birth in 1904 until his death in 1989 at the age of 85, Salvador Dalí’s life spanned almost a century of dramatic social and artistic change.

o   Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire will trace the extraordinary innovation Dalí brought to his art at every stage of his remarkable career.

o   The exhibition will explore Dalí’s career through chronological sections with visitors to the exhibition first encountering Dalí as an accomplished Impressionist painter. The young Dalí had been introduced to the techniques of the Impressionists at the age of 12, and by age 15 he had not only fully absorbed Impressionism but had also begun to move on to study the early works of Matisse and the Fauvist artists.

o   Surprising too will be a subsequent look at the wide variety of styles with which Dalí experimented during his student years in Madrid and after, from Cubism and Abstraction to Neoclassicism and New Objectivity.

o   Dalí’s artistic imagination was constantly fed by the ruggedly romantic landscapes of his native Catalonia, the vast wind-swept plains of the Ampurdán, and the rocky ‘otherworld’ of the Cap de Creus. These landscapes, infused with his unique imagination, informed the now-classic Surrealist paintings with which Dalí astonished the Parisian art world in the early 1930s. A strong group of paintings from the period of Dalí’s involvement with Surrealism in Paris will be included in the exhibition.

o   The exhibition will also consider Salvador Dalí’s contributions to twentieth century cinema, from his early collaborations with the Spanish film-maker Luis Buñuel, to his later involvement with Alfred Hitchcock and other Hollywood directors of the 1940s.
 
o   A special section of the exhibition looks at Dalí’s creation of the Dream of Venus pavilion for the World’s Fair in New York in 1939, a multimedia extravaganza involving painted backdrops, sculptural installations and live models posing in surreal settings or swimming through large glass-sided marine tanks.

o   Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire will celebrate the return to Australia of the artist’s 1932 painting Memory of the Child-Woman. The first Dalí painting ever to be seen in Australia, Memory of the Child-Woman was included in the landmark 1939 Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art organised by Keith Murdoch’s Herald newspaper.

o   Dalí’s painting was certainly a sensation in 1939, its subsequent removal from the exhibition seeming to be synonymous for a still-conservative Australia with all that was daring and compelling about modern art.

o   Dalí’s ties with Spain were severed with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and, with the outbreak of the Second World War, Salvador and his wife Gala relocated from Paris to the United States (where they were resident from 1940-48). The effect of both wars on Dalí’s life and art are considered in the exhibition, along with the impact of his newly affluent life in the US during the war and immediate post-war years.

o   As the exhibition turns to the 1950s, visitors will discover the world of Dalí and Nuclear Mysticism, through a spectacular selection of works that exemplify Dalí’s post-war engagement with the atomic age and nuclear theory. These interests blend with the artist’s reawakened dialogue with Catholicism in the same period.

o   Other sections of the exhibition will examine Dalí’s absorbing interest in science and new technologies in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, from his photographic collaborations with Philippe Halsman to his experiments with stereoscopy and, after 1971, with holography.

o   Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire is a kaleidoscopic and panoramic exhibition that will surprise and delight visitors as it explores the life and art of one of the most colourful and influential figures of the twentieth century.

o   The exhibition will open at the National Gallery of Victoria on 13 June 2009 and will run until 4 October 2009.

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