Folding Screen

In 1949, after a seven-year stay in New York, Salvador and Gala Dalí came back to their home in Portlligat, Spain, where the artist’s eccentricity and surrealist ideas would flourish up to the walls. In this extraordinary house was the present screen, located in the couple’s bedroom. Depicting them both on a vessel, the piece strikes with its mysterious iconography. The olive branch held by Gala could refer to Christian liturgy, as Dalí was known to be a fervent Catholic, but also to classical mythology, and more specifically to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A logarithmic spiral brings another spiritual dimension as it is a mathematical formulation discovered in the 17th century, symbolic of movement and permanence.