Alberto Giacometti / Salvador Dalí. Gardens of Dreams

The exhibition "Gardens of Dreams" brings together in a new and original fashion the works of Alberto Giacometti and Salvador Dalí around the creation of an imaginary garden at the very beginning of the 1930s.

Giacometti and Dalí, both members of the surrealist group, moved in the same art circles. Their exchanges were vivacious, intellectual, creative, and their respective works entered into a fruitful dialogue. This exhibition sheds light on their friendship as well as on their shared taste for the exploration of dreamed places.

In the early 1930s, Giacometti and Dalí jointly designed an extraordinary garden for the viscount and viscountess of Noailles. This four-handed project, known through drawings, features surrealist works by Giacometti in a vast dreamlike landscape characteristic of Dalí's style. This fantasy landscape also incorporates a sculptural environment designed by Giacometti for an open-air space, the Project for a Square.

The Institut Giacometti will present for the first time the reconstruction of the Project for a square. This work illustrates the conception of the garden shared by Giacometti and Dalí, conceived as an illusory and fantasized space, and their taste for ambiguous forms and images.

Exceptional loans complete this original exhibition: major works by the Catalan painter such as The Spectral Cow (1928 - Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne), The Memory of the Child-Woman (1929 - Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid) and Woman with a Head of Roses (1935 - Kunsthaus, Zürich) echo the surrealist works of the Swiss sculptor.

"Gardens of Dreams" thus explores the deep connections between Dalí's dreamlike paintings and Giacometti's enigmatic sculptures, as both artists shared the same research around landscapes, sexuality and dreams

Curator: Émilie Bouvard.

From 13 Dec 2022 to 09 Apr 2023

On the cover: Alberto Giacometti, Trois figures à Maloja, c. 1931
Photo : anonyme
Fondation Giacometti
© Succession Alberto Giacometti / Adagp, Paris 2022

Salvador Dalí, Femme à tête de roses, 1935
Kunsthaus Zürich
© Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres 2022/Adagp, Paris 2022

Source: Fondation Giacometti