Eccentric and bizarre is how Salvador Dali and his paintings are often depicted. The talented Catalan artist born in 1904 in Figueres Spain had a vivid imagination and an extensive artistic talent he explored in many domains such as painting, film, sculpture and photography.
Dali said that his “love of everything that is gilded and excessive”, passion for luxury and “love of oriental clothes” goes back to the Arab origins of his surname Dali which isn’t Spanish or Catalan. He often claimed that his ancestors were descended from the Moors (inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula from Berber and Arab descent).
The painter who reproduced unusual and bizarre images in his works, was considered a surrealist and often depicted this theme in his artwork. Often containing hallucinatory characters and objects, most of his works resemble dream sequences.
He introduced the “Paranoiac-Critical Method” to the Surrealism movement and which consisted of a mental exercise, which accesses the subconscious parts of the mind, as an artistic inspiration, hence the out-of-the-ordinary images in Dali’s paintings.
There is also a lot of symbolism in Dali’s work. Taking a look at his most known work The Persistence of Memory, the ‘melting watches’, which later on became his hallmark, constitute a nod to Einstein’s theory that time is relative and not fixed.
Other recurring images in Dali’s works are the elephant and the egg. The elephant, which symbolizes distortion in space, appeared in his work Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening.
On the other hand, the egg symbolizes hope and love as Dali connects it to the prenatal stage. It appears in The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, which also symbolizes death and petrification.
Overall, Dali’s work and personality were a major influence for modern surrealists and his persona with the famous moustache that became a cultural icon for bizarre and surreal is often depicted in popular culture.
