Dali's Optical Illusions

On view are more than 60 paintings and drawings created from the early 1920s to the 1970s by the Spanish artist Salvador Dali (1904-1989) that focus specifically on his exploration of optics and perception. Dali, whose life-long fascination with dreams led to some of the 20th century's most disturbing visualizations of the unconscious, became famous in the 1920s as a revolutionary and iconoclastic surrealist painter who continually sought ways to combine traditional images and techniques with the most advanced scientific findings. Included in this exhibit are three examples of Dali's experimentation with stereoscopy, a nineteenth-century optical technique that stimulates depth perception. These paintings are viewed with the aid of angled mirrors in the exhibition space.