Salvador Dalí is one of the world most well-known artist, famous for his otherworldly paintings his art was the embodiment of the surrealist movement. Surrealism was born out of a social movement to explore your subconscious, unfiltered, it broke down the social stigma of what it meant to be reserved and proper. Hidden-in-plain-sight in all of Dalí’s paintings is extreme symbolism through the use of different repeating images and symbols. In order to convey the psychoanalytical theories made popular by Freud, Dalí’s artwork revolves around the themes of eroticism and death. Quite explicitly Dalí expresses his sexual anxiety through the use of a grasshopper featured in many of his paintings. In Dalí most iconic painting is The Persistence of Memory (1931), featuring melting clocks in a barren landscape he uses ants to allude to death and decay. But Dalí did more than paint, he worked on sculptures, printmaking, fashion, writing, and film with famous filmmakers Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock. In his later work, he takes on a lot of religious symbolism, promoting chastity as a way to be closer to God. He also became fascinated with the atomic theory after the dropping of the atomic bombs in Japan, he became well versed in the math and sciences. In a sculpture of Jesus on the cross he uses a tesseract (the idea of a four-dimensional cube). Dalí was a true renaissance man, well versed in many subjects and open about his struggles and beliefs. To Dalí he was the embodiment of Surrealism.
Dalí’s iconic mustache look and art aesthetic is still an inspiration to many and continues to be referenced in pop culture. Contemporary Surrealism is a continuation of the past movement, creating fantastic and sometimes disturbing fantasies. Because of the path paved by Dalí and artist like him, we are able to express our abstract feelings and art is encouraged to be raw and unfiltered. Now with the invention of digital arts and its accessibility, surrealism takes on a new level of realism. Photoshop can be used to alter reality even on the slightest levels, training us to be skeptical of every image produced. Whether for advertising or art’s sake, it’s a powerful tool that can help us communicate abstract or complex thoughts. Erik Johansson is an example of a photographer who uses photoshop to create witty scenes that play on their surroundings. His complex scenes are realistic but not always quite right showcasing beautiful landscapes and scenes that tell a story. Using photoshop you can actually change how we perceive the world and put your imagination into an observable form, just like Dalí did with his art. Johansson does this by layering and altering his original photos and doing all the post work himself so that they are seamless and hyper-realistic. This was Dalí’s goal, to show people his ideas and dreams through his art, as a way to be open and better understand the world around him. Johansson does this a new way with a different kind of brush, creating what you could only imagine and giving it life.
For my artifact I created a surrealist photoshop image of a bird with pants.
Sources:
The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/surr/hd_surr.htm.
“ABOUT.” ERIK JOHANSSON, www.erikjo.com/about/.
“Salvador Dalí Art & Analysis.” The Art Story, www.theartstory.org/artist-dali-salvador-artworks.htm#pnt_11.