MILAN.- After over 50 years, Salvador Dalì’s genius is back in Milan: Palazzo Reale houses a great exhibition investigating the relationship between this Spanish artist and the landscape, the dream, the desire.

The exhibition, made possible thanks to the extraordinary collaboration with Fundaciò Gala-Salvador Dalì of Figueres, counts on important loans from Italian and international museums and institutions, including the Fundaciò itself, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia of Madrid, the Dalí Museum of St. Petersburg, Florida, the Boijmans Museum of Rotterdam, the Animation Research Library of the Walt Disney Animation Studios of Burbank, California, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection of Venice, the Mart of Rovereto and the Vatican Museums.

The exhibition focuses on the relationship between painting and landscape.

Salvador Dalì is back in town for the first time since the solo exhibition which took place in October 1954 in Sala delle Cariatidi, always at Palazzo Reale. This same Cariatidi’s room was so inspiring for this artist that he took it as model for his mansion in Figueras, today seat of the Fundaciò Gala-Salvador Dalì.

“Once again, we need Dalì to escape from an often boring and predictable condition. And this exhibition aims exactly to break the cultural conformism and express the great power of creativity at best – explains the Milan City Councillor for Culture Massimiliano Finazzer Flory. “Because the dream is inside of us, and it is one of the manifestations of reality and of desire told by art and through which art tells itself. Dalì in Milan is the symbol of the creativity or – better – of the power of creativity. A relation not to be missed”.

The set of the exhibition is designed by the architect Oscar Tusquests Blanca, friend and collaboration of Salvador Dalì: he is author, together with the master of Surrealism, of Mae West’s room in Figueras’s museum and of the famous sofa Dalilips.
For the first time, the Mae West room will be reproduced inside this exhibition exactly as Dalì originally imagined it: an extraordinary surprisingly installation of contemporary art.

“Salvador Dalí. Il sogno si avvicina” counts on a top level scientific committee, composed of important international scholars: Montse Aguer, director of the study centre on Dalì of the Fundaciò; Hank Hines, director of the Dalí Museum of St. Petersburg; Antonio Paolucci, director of Vatican Museums; Francisco Calvo Serraller, out standing expert of Spanish modern art; Robert Storr, American curator and art critic of the Yale School of Art.

In the exhibition path is possible to enjoy the short animation movie Destino, by Salvador Dalì and Walt Disney, never on Italian screens before: Dalì worked side by side with Disney between 1945 and 1946, but the movie was completed only in 2003 thanks to the original drawings preserved at the Animation Research Library of Walt Disney Animation Studios of Burbank, California. Some of these drawings are also extraordinary displayed thanks to the important collaboration with The Walt Disney Company.