Salvador Dalí

SALVADOR DALÍ I DOMÉNECH (Figueras, Girona, 1904 - 1989).
"Venus of the Tires". 1979 (cast in 2003).
Bronze sculpture (lost wax technique), patinated in dark green.
Exemplary 2/6.
Numbered, signed by the artist, with signature of the Arte6 Foundry and Diejasa Edition.
Certified by Robert Descharnes (2004) and Nicolas Descharnes (2014).
This is a limited reedition of 6 pieces from the Clot Collection.
Measurements: 233 x 85 cm.

The "Venus of the Tires" is a bronze of considerable proportions. As the title warns, it represents a female nude with two tires: one serves as a base and the other surrounds her waist as if it were a float. The woman adopts a Greek-inspired contrapposto, which also recalls some Renaissance models borrowed from Antiquity (such as Botticelli or Donatello). It was a common strategy in Dalí's work: the rereading of Greco-Roman splendor in a surrealist key, the transfiguration of the Venus with the inclusion of drawers or transforming their human heads into fish heads. Here we are before a new version of the goddess of love and sensuality, which on this occasion leads us to think about subconscious issues linked to the state of "floating", dreams, lightness, weightlessness, rescue or the sinking of reason.

This sculpture comes from Isidro Clot's sculpture collection. The collection was initially conceived in the summer of 1971 in Port Lligat, where an elderly Dalí, but still with plenty of creative enthusiasm, began to sculpt a series of wax sculptures. The figures were modeled under the hot Mediterranean sun, which made the wax soft and malleable, leaving the delicate fingers of the master from Figueras marked on the surface. In his book "Dalí: The Hard and the Soft Spells for the Magic of Form: Sculptures and Objects", Robert Descharnes, a friend and renowned expert on Dalí, describes the process of creating the sculptures. In 1973, 44 sculptures made so far were cast in bronze by his friend Isidro Clot, who ran the Diejasa foundry together with his son-in-law Adrián Campos. The casting process was closely followed by Dalí, a very important aspect that makes the piece in bidding an original of the genius of Port Lligat.

The work we present here is part of a limited reedition of six pieces from the Clot Collection, cast by the company Diejasa. To the same series belong: "Reloj blando", "Cisne-elefante", "Doble Victoria de Samotracia", "Geminis".The sculptures that make up the Clot collection reflect Dalí's maturity and distorted classicism, in such a way that they define the themes that disturbed and aroused the curiosity of the surrealist master throughout his life: Ancient Greece, eroticism, psychism, his relationship with Gala, playfulness, Christian iconography... and the paranoiac-critical transfiguration of all these references.