Salvador Dalí’s first solo exhibition took place in 1925 at the Galerías Dalmau, the historic gallery on Passeig de Gràcia (previously it had been on Carrer del Pi and Portaferrissa) that was a beacon of the avant-garde and promoter of new artists. Dalí was one of them. He was 21 years old and showed works such as Girl at the Window, the portrait of his sister Anna Maria from behind, contemplating the seascape of Cadaqués, now in the Reina Sofía in Madrid. He repeated the following year. A century later, he returns to the stage where he first met success face to face with Dalí Boulevard Cibernético, an immersive experience that from next week will have a permanent space in Casa Amatller.
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To celebrate Dalí’s return to Barcelona, from this Saturday until September 22, three giant eggs like those crowning the Torre Galatea in Figueres or his house-museum in Portlligat will be installed on Passeig de Gràcia. The eggs, of which exact reproductions have been made in a workshop in Barcelona, will be placed on the avenue, within the section known as the block of discord. The idea was to line the street from top to bottom with numerous Dalí eggs, but the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí and Layers of Reality have only obtained permission to place three.
“It’s time to reconnect with Dalí’s figure because Barcelona has turned its back,” says Jordi Sellas
“Dalí doesn’t have a street, a square, nothing that remembers him in Barcelona, hence the nod to calling the new space Dalí Boulevard,” says Jordi Sellas, CEO of Layers of Reality. “The City Council has played very much in favor and that’s good: it’s time to reconnect with Dalí’s figure because Barcelona has turned its back. That he hasn’t been given the place he deserves with the argument that he was a Francoist, honestly, seems to me a very superficial reading,” Sellas opines, who in the four years that Dalí Cibernético has been touring the world (it is about to be relaunched in its renewed version) has witnessed the admiration it arouses both in the U.S. and in Asia, “where in any top ten of the greats of the art world he appears alongside Leonardo, Michelangelo, or Van Gogh.” “It is a huge heritage we have and in Barcelona he has not been treated with enough affection,” he insists.
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Sellas draws a parallel with Gaudí, who for years was disparaged “until suddenly someone realizes he is important by seeing how he is valued abroad. And the funny thing is that Dalí was the only relevant voice nationally and internationally who very early said that Gaudí was a genius. He had himself photographed by Oriol Maspons at La Pedrera when modernism was not in fashion. And he vindicated him by giving incredible lectures and happenings in Park Güell. And now the same thing is happening to him, he is the object of a slow recovery.”
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