Salvador Dalí (1904–1989, Figueres, Spain) created some of the most extraordinary images in the history of art. Melting clocks, burning giraffes, floating bodies and impossible landscapes made him the world's most recognisable Surrealist. Yet behind his extravagant moustache and theatrical personality stood a man profoundly fascinated by identity, dreams, desire and the mysteries of the human mind.
His story began with a death.
Nine months before Dalí was born, his older brother, also named Salvador, had died as a young child. His parents gave their second son the same name, and Dalí would later describe how the memory of his dead brother haunted his childhood.
The question of identity would become a recurring obsession throughout his life.
As a young art student in Madrid, Dalí befriended the poet Federico García Lorca and filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Their friendship helped introduce him to a world of radical ideas, artistic experimentation and intellectual freedom.
But everything changed in 1929.
That year, Dalí met Gala, a Russian-born woman who was then married to the French poet Paul Éluard. Their attraction was immediate, and Gala would become his lifelong companion, muse and indispensable collaborator.
She was far more than the woman in his paintings. Gala managed his career, negotiated with collectors and galleries, and helped transform the eccentric young artist into an international phenomenon. Dalí even signed some of his paintings with both their names, acknowledging her essential role in his success.
Around the same time, Dalí joined the Surrealists in Paris and developed his celebrated paranoiac-critical method, using unexpected associations and visual illusions to explore the unconscious mind.
In 1931, he painted The Persistence of Memory, with its unforgettable melting clocks. The painting transformed an ordinary object associated with precision and order into something soft, unstable and dreamlike.
Suddenly, even time itself seemed uncertain.
Dalí's extraordinary technical precision made these impossible worlds disturbingly believable. Unlike artists who moved towards abstraction, he used almost photographic realism to depict things that could never exist.
But the man who challenged artistic conventions was also capable of deeply controversial political choices.
His relationship with the Surrealists deteriorated during the 1930s, partly because of disagreements over politics. While artists such as Picasso and Miró opposed Franco, Dalí later publicly supported the Spanish dictator's regime. His political position remains a troubling aspect of his legacy.
During the Second World War, Dalí and Gala lived in the United States, where his fame grew beyond the art world. He collaborated with filmmakers, designers and fashion houses, transforming himself into an instantly recognisable celebrity.
After returning to Spain in 1948, his work increasingly explored religion, nuclear physics, mathematics and the mysteries of existence. His imagination extended far beyond painting into sculpture, original printmaking, jewellery, film and design.
Yet for all his public extravagance, Gala remained the central figure in his private world.
When she died in 1982, Dalí was devastated. His health and artistic activity declined during his final years. He died in Figueres in 1989, aged 84, and was buried beneath the extraordinary theatre-museum he had created in his hometown.
Dalí spent his life making the impossible appear real, while turning his own personality into an extraordinary artistic creation. His paintings invite us into a world where nothing is quite what it seems — perhaps not even the man who painted them.