Dali Galatea of the Spheres 60 x 80 cm art print

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Dalí enjoyed improbable mash-ups. Here, Renaissance art meets atomic theory. After Hiroshima, Dalí became fascinated by nuclear physics and the idea that matter was, no matter how solid it seemed, in essence discontinuous, made up of distinct atomic particles. This painting depicts a bust of Gala through a matrix of spheres suspended in space. The vanishing point, where the spheres flow to infinity, is her mouth. In Greek mythology, the sculptor Pygmalion falls in love with Galatea, a beautiful statue he’s created, after Aphrodite brings it to life. Galatea of the Spheres is a painting by Salvador Dalí made in 1952. It depicts Gala Dalí, Salvador Dalí's wife and muse, as pieced together through a series of spheres arranged in a continuous array. The name Galatea refers to a sea nymph of Classical mythology renowned for her virtue, and may also refer to the statue beloved by its creator, Pygmalion. (en) is made up of a discontinuous, fragmented setting, densely populated by spheres, which on the axis of the canvas takes on a prodigious three-dimensional vision and perspective. As with earlier Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Swans Reflecting Elephants uses the reflection in a lake to create the double image seen in the painting. In Metamorphosis, the reflection of

Salvador Dalí, “One Second Before Awakening from a Dream Provoked by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate” (1944) Gala also grew tired of living with her husband's eccentricities who, to appease her, bought Gala a castle in Púbol, Spain. It was a space that was Gala's alone; even her husband was not allowed to visit unless he was formally invited. Citing the co-ordinator of the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Jordi Artigas i Cadena, Minder describes how Gala wanted the castle to be "a place of silence and nostalgia, designed for a lady looking for her lost Russian youth" and that Dalí "decorated the interior specifically for his wife, encrusting some ceilings with a 'G' coat of arms in her honor". Dalí himself wrote in his Unspeakable Confessions in 1973: "I gave her a mansion [...] where she would reign like an absolute sovereign, right up to the point that I could visit her only by hand-written invitation from her. I limited myself to the pleasure of decorating her ceilings so that when she raised her eyes, she would always find me in her sky".Apparently Dalí wished for this painting to be displayed in the Dalí Theatre museum in Figueras, indeed it remains there til this day. This 1952 oil on canvas painting is a loving and honorable tribute to his wife and muse Gala, who often sat for him.

critical association of delirious phenomena." Dali used this method to bring forth the hallucinatory forms, double images and visual illusions that filled his paintings during the Thirties. The surrealists saw in Dali the promise of a breakthrough of the surrealist dilemma. Many of the surrealists had broken away from the movement, feeling that direct political action had to come Sometimes, a little boy appears in Dalí’s paintings. In “The Spectre of Sex Appeal”, the boy looks at a hideous, propped-up assemblage of festering flesh. And here he is again, in an image where Gala basks happily in the sun, a pair of lamb chops on her shoulder. In his book “The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí”, published in 1942, Dalí satirised people’s attempts to read the painting. “The meaning of this, as I later learned, was that instead of eating her, I had decided to eat a pair of raw chops…The chops were in effect the expiatory victims of an abortive sacrifice – like Abraham’s ram, and William Tell’s apple.” breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of autostrangulation." The desecration of the human body was a great preoccupation of the Surrealists in general, and of Dali in particular. They never touch each other, symbolizing the nuclear theory that Dali was aware of. Dali was particularly pleased with the depth of perspective he achieved in this picture according to his friend and fellow painter, Pitxot. Dali also created a sense of movement and pace in this piece, particularly through Galatea's flowing hair.

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Narcissus is used to mirror the shape of the hand on the right of the picture. Here, the three swans in front of bleak, leafless trees are reflected in the lake so that the swans' heads become