ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA.- The Salvador Dalí Museum presents “Salvador Dali: Hand Painted Dream Photographs, Selections From the Permanent Collection,” on view through November 9, 2003. The museum also presents the exhibition “Joan Fontcuberta: Imaginary Gardens, Mapping Dali’s Landscapes”.

Commissioned by the Salvador Dalí Museum, Joan Fontcuberta, Imaginary Gardens: Mapping Dalí’s Landscapes establishes a dialogue with Dalí’s paintings. Works by the renowned Catalan photographer, Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955), are displayed alongside the Dalí paintings from the museum’s permanent collection that inspired the Fontcuberta works. These pairings offer opportunities of mixing and matching two distinct bodies of work. Fontcuberta engages with Dalí, allowing a more complex view of Dalí’s contemporary relevance.

Fontcuberta’s pieces appear as large-format landscape photographs, suggesting panoramic photography and earlier attempts by romantic painting to capture the vastness of landscape.

Dalís approach to painting was rooted in the specific landscapes of the Ampurdan interior and the area around Cadaquí and Port Lligat. Dalí’s landscapes correspond to readily identifiable places. The element of invention, so apparent in Dalí’s extraordinary "dreamscapes," represents the familiar Catalan landscapes of the Ampurdan and Costa Brava.

Fontcuberta’s landscapes take Dalí’s paintings as their model. The element of the "invented" intrudes into the "natural" to startling effect. Fontcuberta uses various digital imaging programs to transform information culled from Dalí’s paintings. He thereby produces highly "realistic" landscapes corresponding to art, but with no source in geography. This series is appropriately called Orogenesis, meaning the generation of mountains or the "generation of landscape." Those derived from Dalí’s paintings were preceded by a group based on famous artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - from the Romantics Friedrich and Turner to the modern artists Van Gogh, Stieglitz, Weston, and Pollock - a selection of which is included here.

These are not photographs. Neither a camera, nor is a lens is involved. There is no film. The image is constructed entirely in the computer and printed using the chromogenic dye process. These are photographs without photography.

In 1935 Dalí wrote of painting, as "instantaneous color photography done by hand..." For him painting aspired to photography, with the technique so refined that it erased the artist’s hand. If Dalí moved from painting towards photography, so Fontcuberta has moved from photography towards painting. In doing so has questioned the truth-function of photography, asserting its artistic role.

"A single being has attained a plan of life whose image is comparable to the serene perfection of the Renaissance, Gala, my wife, who I had the miraculous good fortune to choose. Consequently, in all of the great genre paintings, there appears the one and only unique presence, the visible woman, Gala."  Salvador Dalí

This exhibit presents a selection of 43 images of Gala, Dalí’s Russian wife, who was both his muse and icon throughout his career. The exhibit from the permanent collection includes two original portraits by Dalí one hologram, and a variety of photos from different points in her life by photographers including Philippe Halsman, Marc Lacroix, Meliton Casals "Melí" and Robert Descharnes.

Born Helena Diakanoff Devulina in Kazan, Russia, on August 26, 1894, she was destined to become one of the most enigmatic females of the early twentieth century. She was deliberately evasive about the details of her youth, and even her birth date and the spelling of her name have been disputed. One fact generally agreed upon is that the names Galuchka and Gala were both nicknames from her childhood. It was through the dedications of her first husband, the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard, that she became known to the world as Gala.

As a muse, Gala was unrivaled in the world of Surrealism. Not only did she marry two of the greatest Surrealists, Dalí and Eluard, inspiring some of their best work, but her charisma and intelligence led to affairs with other Surrealists including Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico. When a Surrealist would create a particularly fine work, it was said that "he was inspired by Gala."

Yet in the summer of 1929, when Gala met Dalí she turned her back on the group to devote herself to the intense young Spaniard. While she was 10 years older than Dalí she sensed a common bond and recognized the authenticity of his vision and its potential, guiding him from success to success for the next fifty years. This exhibit surveys the various facets of Gala’s life with Dalí from model, wife, and companion, to thinker, advisor and muse. Gala is celebrated throughout Dalí’s paintings and writings, and they remained together through her death of heart failure on June 10, 1982, at the age of 87. She is buried in her castle in Pubol, near Figueres, Spain.