DALÍ & THE ZODIAC

Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989) was a master of painting, watercolor, gouache, lithographs, etchings, and sculpture. But regardless of the medium, Dalí’s art bursts with an inventiveness that few artists can match. The namesake of Surrealism, yet Dalí’s work defies categories. He captured the bold, beautiful and fantastic workings of his imagination. An imagination keen on exploring and exploding boundaries, boundaries of human nature—rationality, sexuality and eroticism. Most importantly, Dalí created art to illuminate the mysteries of our world.

No doubt this is why Dalí developed his celebrated Zodiac images. Images, which grew out of his affinity for the study of the Zodiac, astrology and ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Images, which reflect Dalí’s ambition to transcend the everyday. And Dalí devoted numerous paintings, gouaches, watercolors, prints and plasters to this favorite iconography. The gouaches, Dalí made in the fifties andsixties; the lithographs and etchings of the sixties and seventies as well as the many paintings which incorporate images related to the Zodiac, define our visual vocabulary for the Zodiac.

So it is no surprise that Dalí wanted to create a three dimensional counterpart for the Zodiac images. And these bronze bas reliefs realize Dalí’s ambition. Based on the very plasters that Dalí created, the bas reliefs are vivid expressions of the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Each offers Dalí’s remarkable interpretations of these popular signs. At the same time, each is a unique work of art, a collector’s item for Dalí connoisseurs.

Dalí’s genius illuminates the mysteries of our world. Dalí stated, “Your sign is your destiny.” For Dalí, the zodiac was a gateway to the mysteries of human nature. Studying the zodiac, astrology and ancient mythology, he created numerous paintings, gouaches, watercolors, prints and plasters to celebrate the zodiac. In the 1960s, Dalí created the gouaches of the XII Signs of the Zodiac, and soon after, the plaster molds for the XII Signs of the Zodiac, made into bronze reliefs in 2010. And like Dalí’s other inventive imagery, Dalí’s interpretation of the zodiac signs inspires our imagination. Each of Dalí’s XII Signs of the Zodiac is a unique work of art, a collector’s item for connoisseurs. Their fascinating chronology begins in the 1960s when Dalí created the gouaches and lithographs of the XII Signs of the Zodiac. With their success, in the late 1960s, the Zodiac lithograph publisher, Leon Amiel, commissioned Dalí to create the Zodiac plaster molds. R.H. Brown & Co. acquired the original plaster molds from Amiel; in the 1970s R.H. Brown & Co. sold the molds for $410,000 per mold to twelve investors. Those molds were stored in the original foundry until the 1990s. In 2008, development of the bas reliefs from the original molds began at the same foundry, now the Elliott Gantz Foundry. Collaborating with noted experts, and with painstaking attention to detail, Dalí Zodiac, LLC commissioned the Gantz foundry to produce bronze sculpture reliefs from the original Zodiac plaster molds for a limited edition (250). Finally in 2010, more than 40 years after the creation of the original molds, the bronze sculptures were produced. And in June 2011, the William Bennett Gallery in New York City unveiled the first ever complete set of the reliefs in a special summer exhibition.