Dalí Exhibition in Palazzo Grassi
Curated by Oscar Tusquets Blanca with Silvia Farriol.
"Dalí would have been delighted to see his work exhibited in a classic Venetian palazzo, looking onto the Grand Canal, a place he so much admired and which had so many memories for him. For this reason the staging respects the building’s architecture as far as possible. Hardly any windows are blocked—windows from which the Campo and the Canal can be seen.
Dalí would have been hugely satisfied by the attention that the curator, Dawn Ades, has paid to his period least highly rated by progressive critics: the post-Surrealist period (although he would have contended that he never abandoned Surrealism: “Le surrealisme c’est moi”). Consequently we have created a route round the exhibition that is roughly chronological, but which works backwards, starting with his last canvas and ending with childhood.
Dalí would have been fascinated by this curious backwards reading, a psychoanalytic analysis of his complex personality.
Dalí, no doubt, would have encouraged me to make a 3-D interpretation of one of the paintings on show in the cortile, the core of the exhibition. We had already done that with the face of Mae West, and that was a thrilling experience, we enjoyed ourselves enormously and we created one of the most popular rooms in the Figueres museum.
For a variety of reasons we were not able to support anything on the paving of the cortile, so our sculpture had to be suspended above it; what could be more Dalinian than to launch an enormous pomegranate, a gaping fish and two fearsome tigers into the air above the defenceless visitors’ heads?"
