Salvador Dali exhibition, Barcelona

On a recently holiday to Spain, I spent an afternoon in Barcelona where I chanced upon a career retrospective of the great Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali at the Real Circulo Atistico Museum of Barcelona in the Gothic Quarter of the city.

I knew a little of Dali's surrealist films, having seen his work with Luis Bunuel on Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or from the 1930s but I wasn't particularly au fait with his paintings. Being a keen advocate of surrealism in all forms though, I paid my 8€ and entered.

I'm glad I did, mainly because I saw what has become one of my favourite pieces of surrealist art. It seemed to sum up everything that I liked about the genre, even by just looking at the title. It was called "Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone" (pictured below). Even for someone like myself who doesn't always understand the meaning of artworks, the recurring themes were easy to pick out. The biggest singular theme was the image of a naked woman; of which nearly every picture seemed to have one buried under the absurd imagery on the surface. There were also recurring works of Don Quixote and a number of animal sculptures and paintings.

This all made me think about the way that my thought process works. Is there a naked breast hidden amongst the majority of my thoughts and ideas if I search hard enough? There has been scientific research that suggests that men think about sex every 52 seconds (or 7 seconds depending on what research you read) and Dali was obviously a repeat offender in this. It was most notable in a small series of what appear on the surface to be scribbles on pieces of paper, which almost like a Magic Eye poster from the 1990s revealed a subtle breast or genitalia if you stared closely enough.

Perhaps Dali was highlighting the fact that however we present ourselves as humans, the only thing that remains true of everyone on earth is our collected animal instinct.