Who is Salvador Dali?

Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was a Spanish Surrealist artist renowned for his technical brilliance, flamboyant personality, and iconic imagery including melting clocks and elephants on spindly legs. His painting ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (1931) remains one of the most recognizable artworks of the 20th century. Dali developed the paranoiac-critical method to access the unconscious, creating hallucinatory double images with hyperrealistic precision. Beyond painting, Dali worked in film (collaborating with Luis Bunuel and Alfred Hitchcock), sculpture, photography, and design. His theatrical self-promotion made him a celebrity, though Andre Breton eventually expelled him from the Surrealist group. Dali’s technical mastery and bizarre imagination continue influencing artists across Surrealism and Pop Surrealism.