Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Paintings that trick the eye and baffle the brain

Galatea of the Spheres (1952) by Salvador Dalí 

 At first glance, the dynamic painting appears to capture the outward propulsion, towards the viewer, of countless colourful atoms – as if suspending in mid-blast a nuclear explosion occurring over a watery expanse. Zoom out, and the seemingly lawless rush of spheres cohere loosely into the coy countenance of a woman’s bust, her head tilted gently in a manner that recalls countless Renaissance madonnas. Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí’s Galatea of the Spheres was undertaken at a moment of intense global anxiety at the prospect of nuclear armageddon and reveals Dalí’s own accelerating preoccupation with atomic theory in the years following the US nuclear attacks on Japan in 1945. The artist’s wife, Gala Dalí, inspired the endlessly decomposing and composing portrait. By embellishing Gala’s name into an echo of the mythological sea-nymph Galatea of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dalí has constructed an elastic work that simultaneously pulls together themes of antiquity and particle physics and blows them to smithereens.
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