SALVADOR DALÍ I DOMÈNECH (Figueres, Girona, 1904... Lot 31

SALVADOR DALÍ I DOMÈNECH (Figueres, Girona, 1904 - 1989). "Madonna of Port Lligat", ca. 1969. Bronze sculpture, example A 289/300. Marble base. Signed and justified. Size: 21 x 7,5 x 7,5 cm. With this "Madonna", Dalí paid homage to Port Lligat. According to the catalogue "Dalí's Sculptures" (published by Diejasa): "For Salvador Dalí, who had been a tireless traveller, his Catalan land was always a refuge and an oracle, essential keys in the creation of his work. Facing the Mediterranean, his gods and Lares revealed to him a mysterious world, which in his mystical-metaphysical period, which began in the 1950s, became transcendent. Port Lligat is his fiefdom, the place of his phantasmagorias and where the Madonnas give him strength and stimulus to continue to realise what he discovers in the deformed, concave and convex mirrors of his cosmic-paranoid hallucinations. The perforated rocks of the Costa Brava are a constant image in Dalí's mineral figures. And the windows, the holes open to infinity, are orifices full of symbolism: the anguish of emptiness, which in this Madonna is ready to throw with her delicate hand, like Ceres, the beneficial seeds on the earth that Dalí has chosen. She is a virgin-goddess, pagan and pre-Christian. In his early years, Dalí discovered contemporary painting during a family visit to Cadaqués, where he met the family of Ramon Pichot, an artist who travelled regularly 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 travelled to Paris for the first time. There he met Picasso, and established certain formal characteristics that were to become distinctive of all his work from then on. His language absorbed the influences of many artistic styles, from classical academicism to the most groundbreaking avant-garde. At that time, the painter grew an eye-catching moustache in imitation of Velázquez's, which was to become his personal trademark for the rest of his life. In 1929, Dalí collaborated with Luis Buñuel in the making of "An Andalusian Dog", which depicted scenes typical of the surrealist imaginary. In August of the same year he met his muse and future wife Gala. During this period Dalí held regular exhibitions in both Barcelona and Paris, and joined the Surrealist group based in the Montparnasse district of Paris. His work greatly influenced the direction of Surrealism for the next two years, and he was acclaimed as the creator of the paranoiac-critical method, which was said to help access the subconscious by releasing creative artistic energies. The painter landed in America in 1934, thanks to the art dealer Julian Levy. Following his first solo exhibition in New York his international reputation was definitively consolidated, and from then on he exhibited his work and gave lectures all over the world. Most of his production is housed 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) and the Dalí Universe in London.