Dali is back in Milan and he's there in his rightful place as the grand master of Surrealism. Over 50 of his works have been collected in the Palace of the Lombard capital under the title Il sogno si avvicina – the dream approaches – in an exhibition that shows the artist's relationship with landscapes, dreams and desires.Open to the public until January 30th, 2010, the exhibition explores the landscapes the artist created in his paintings, many of them imaginary, but many, too, reinterpretations of the beloved scenes of Alt Emporda, in Catalonia, the land of his birth, whose quality of light he loved and reflected in his work.
The exhibition is divided into four sections that cover different areas of the artist's work and show how these reflect both the interior world and how Dali perceived his surroundings. The first section, Historical Landscapes, is split between the display rooms of Memory, which illustrates the artist's relationship with the past, from Roman Classicism to Post-realism - and of Evil, in which Dali recovers and interprets the scenes of his time such as the Spanish Civil War and the bombing ofHiroshima.
The display room of the Imagination and Desires forms part of the Autobiographical Landscapes section, which includes works related to the artist's Surrealist period, in which Dali depicts what happens within the psyche. In the room of Desires there is also the first reproduction of the Mae West room, one of the most emblematic scenes of the Dali Theatre and Museum in his hometown of Figueres.
In Landscapes of Absence, the third section, we see how Dali leaves the representation of the human figure and moves on to nature. Finally, the exhibition ends with an Epilogue, which recounts the collaboration between 1945 and 1946 between the Catalonian artist and Walt Disney. This collaboration resulted, after Dali's death, in the short film Destiny, a six-minute film which was released in 2003 and received an Oscar nomination.
Further information: ‘Il sogno si avvicina’