Dali Freud
Design of the exhibition at Lower Belvedere
On July 19, 1938, Salvador Dalí met Sigmund Freud, who had fled Vienna, in London - it was the artist's first and only meeting with his idol. Dalí's high expectations remained unfulfilled: His ambitious wish to gain recognition for his paranoic-critical method from Freud "from a scientific point of view" was not fulfilled. Nevertheless, the founder of psychoanalysis was subsequently more deeply impressed than expected and inclined to reconsider his hitherto distanced attitude toward Surrealism.
The Belvedere uses around 100 works - including paintings, surrealist objects, photographs, films, books, journals, letters and other documents - to illuminate Dalí as a person against the backdrop of his complex family universe, following him from his discovery of Freud's writings to his meeting with the psychoanalyst in exile in London in 1938.
The reading of the Interpretation of Dreams became for the young artist one of the most important discoveries of his life. Through Freud's writings he found the key to hidden fears, desires and obsessions that had accompanied him since childhood. Influenced by this, he began to explore the poetics of Surrealism in 1926 and developed a new visual language that makes his work unique to this day. In addition to Dalí's meeting with Freud, the exhibition focuses on other seminal encounters of the artist, such as those with the poet Federico García Lorca and the filmmaker Luis Buñuel at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. Like the histologist and Nobel Prize winner Santiago Ramón y Cajal and his drawings of nerve tissue, they became the inspiration for his surrealist work.
The first show in the newly renovated Lower Belvedere, designed by Margula Architects, dispenses completely with exhibition walls: as a homage to Friedrich Kiesler's “Laboratory of Design Correlation”, all exhibits are presented in specially made object libraries. A soft carpet guides visitors through the intimate emotional worlds of Dalí and Freud. Five pink islands divide the exhibition into its chapters.
"For the show, the elongated hall was designed by Margula Architects to be open and wrapped in a fleshy red dress: The walls and floor seem to take on almost amorphous features. As in a feverish dream, the influences of Freud's theories on Dalí's painterly imagery can be traced in five stations: a look into the abysses of bizarre dreams, absurd fantasies and fears." Der Standard
Curator
Jaime Brihuega Sierra
ASSISTANT CURATOR
Stephanie Auer
EXHIBITION ARCHITECTURE
Margula Architects
TEAM
Itai Margula, Theresa Margraf, Theresa Kraus
LOCATION
Unteres Belvedere
DURATION of the Exhibition
28. Jänner bis 29. Mai 2022
LINKS
Texte zur Kunst
Vol 4 No 2 (2022): The Role of Urban Imaginaries
