“The two luckiest things that can happen to a contemporary painter are: first, to be Spanish, and second, to be named Dalí. That is what happened to me”.
Salvador Dalí, Manifeste Mystique, 1951.
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In the heart of Sassuolo, Dalí Universe presents a journey into the extraordinary: the exhibition “Salvador Dalí: Avida Dollars – Science and Faith”.
Currently hosted at the Fine Art Gallery in Sassuolo, this curated experience invites visitors to immerse themselves in the complex, multifaceted mind of the Master of Surrealism through a selection of masterpieces defining his later, most profound years.
This exclusive event transforms the architectural and cultural landscape of the city, exploring the electric friction between Dalí’s material success and his spiritual evolution.
The works, drawn from the prestigious collection of the Dalí Universe, have been meticulously chosen to illustrate the three pillars of Dalí’s maturity: his obsession with the “Avida Dollars” persona, his reverence for scientific discovery, and his mystical return to faith.
At the heart of the exhibition stands the monumental bronze sculpture, “Saint George and the Dragon”. Chosen for its deep resonance with the local identity, as Saint George is the revered Patron Saint of Sassuolo, this masterpiece serves as the definitive bridge between Dalí’s universal surrealist language and the historical heart of the city.
As Dalí himself proclaimed: “I am surrealism… I have repudiated nothing; on the contrary, I have reaffirmed, sublimated, hierarchised, rationalised, dematerialised, spiritualised everything”.
While the struggle of Saint George has been immortalised by masters like Raphael and Paolo Uccello, Dalí transfigures this traditional martyrdom into a “symbolic psychoanalysis of the human condition”. His Saint George is a “gallant horseman in shining armor”, captured at a precise, frozen moment of triumph over the primordial forces of evil.
The exhibition title pays homage to the famous anagram “Avida Dollars” (greedy for dollars), mockingly coined by André Breton in 1942. However, this transition from rebel to icon was not merely a financial strategy; it was a response to a profound existential crisis.
Following his formal expulsion from the Surrealist circle in 1939, a move Breton intended as a campaign of defamation, Dalí staged a masterful “program of negation”. While Breton remained in self-imposed isolation in America, refusing to learn English to protect the “purity” of his prose, Dalí embraced the New World’s machinery of fame. He effectively wrote Breton out of the Surrealist record, famously declaring, “I am Surrealism.”
To Dalí, the “Avida Dollars” moniker was the ultimate postmodern irony: he dismantled the paternal authority of Breton to replace it with a personal mythology that was at once classical and commercially invincible.
Moving through the gallery, the visitor encounters Dalí’s profound fascination with the scientific mysteries of the twentieth century. This intellectual hunger is brilliantly manifested in the exhibition through the bronze “Surrealist Newton” and the visionary graphic series “The Conquest of the Cosmos”.
Dalí was captivated by the unseen forces that govern our existence, from the splitting of the atom to the crystalline perfection of the genetic code. He viewed the double helix not merely as a biological structure, but as a divine architecture, famously stating: “The DNA is the only thing that links us to God. It is the real Jacob’s ladder, made of the same spiral of the DNA molecules. This is the spiral of the soul”.
The journey concludes with Dalí’s mystical return to faith. Featuring the lithographs of the “Madonna of Port Lligat” and the “Madonna of Raphael”, the exhibition shows how Dalí reconciled nuclear physics with Catholic mysticism.
It is fascinating to note that Dalí’s embrace of Catholicism and Renaissance values was initially framed as a calculated “Anti-Surrealist” stance. By the early 1940s, he had strategically aligned his imagination with a “return to order”, rejecting the chaotic automatism of his peers in favor of the “Divine Proportion”.
The journey is completed by Dalí’s illustrations for Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, tracing a path from the “demoniacal experiment” of his youth to the spiritual harvest of his later years.
Dalí spent his existence searching for Heaven, concluding it was found “exactly in the center of the bosom of the man who has faith”. Through this 2026 exhibition in Sassuolo, the Dalí Universe invites the public to witness this vital energy, where courage is channeled directly from the flames of the subconscious into the light of art.