{"id":1835480,"date":"2026-03-19T16:19:20","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T13:19:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1835480"},"modified":"2026-03-19T16:19:20","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T13:19:20","slug":"di-donna-to-mount-first-major-dali-show-in-nyc-in-nearly-two-decades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1835480","title":{"rendered":"Di Donna to Mount First Major Dal\u00ed Show in NYC in Nearly Two Decades"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/02-Dali-El-desnonament-del-moble-aliment-The-Eviction-of-Furniture-Nutrition-1.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

\n
\n

\n\tAs Emmanuel Di Donna\u00a0prepares to leave his Madison Avenue gallery,\u00a0the veteran dealer\u00a0is returning to the artist most people think they already understand.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis spring, Di Donna Galleries will mount one of the most significant exhibitions of\u00a0Salvador Dal\u00ed\u00a0seen in New York in decades. \u201cDal\u00ed: The Great Years, 1929\u20131939,\u201d on view from April 16 through June 13, brings together more than two dozen paintings, sculptures, and works on paper focused on the decade in which the artist forged his visual language and his public persona.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt is the first major Dal\u00ed presentation in the city since the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s 2008 exhibition, and it will be the last staged in Di Donna\u2019s current space before he embarks on a\u00a0new joint venture\u00a0with Pace and David Schrader.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFor a dealer\u00a0with a reputation\u00a0for expanding the canon of Surrealism\u2014often spotlighting overlooked figures and reframing the movement\u2019s global reach\u2014the decision to focus on Dal\u00ed may seem obvious.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere hasn\u2019t been a proper Dal\u00ed show in New York in years,\u201d Di Donna said, pointing to the difficulty of assembling one. The best works, he noted, are largely held by museums and major collections, where they function as anchors for entire institutions. \u201cThey\u2019re magnets,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople don\u2019t want to let them go, even for a few months.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>
Salvador Dal\u00ed, Untitled (Dream of Venus)<\/em>, 1939. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mr. and Mrs.
Joseph R. Shapiro. \u00a9 Salvador Dal\u00ed, Fundaci\u00f3 Gala-Salvador Dal\u00ed \/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2018<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tLoans for the exhibition come from institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Salvador Dal\u00ed Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. (A handful of the works in the show are for sale).<\/p>\n

\n\tThat scarcity has shaped both the market and the public\u2019s understanding of the artist. Dal\u00ed is one of the most recognizable names in 20th-century art, but his reputation has been flattened into a handful of images\u2014the melting clocks, the theatrical mustache\u2014rather than the psychologically dense, formally rigorous work of his early career.<\/p>\n

\n\tDi Donna\u2019s exhibition zeroes in on the years between 1929 and 1939, when Dal\u00ed aligned himself with the Surrealists, developed his paranoiac-critical method, and began producing the imagery that would define his legacy.\u00a0As Di Donna put it, \u201cthat decade is when Dal\u00ed became Dal\u00ed.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe show traces an artist channeling Freud, confronting personal trauma, and translating those impulses into meticulously rendered dreamscapes. <\/strong>Works from the period reveal an approach that is at once deeply intellectual and deliberately theatrical, collapsing the boundary between the unconscious and the visible world.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt the same time, Dal\u00ed was moving far beyond the canvas. He collaborated with figures as unlikely as\u00a0Coco Chanel\u00a0and\u00a0Harpo Marx, sending the latter a harp strung with barbed wire and later working with him on film ideas, gestures that treated popular culture not as something beneath fine art, but as material to be reshaped.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>
Emmanuel Di Donna. Photo by Pauline Shapiro Photography.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tContemporary artists now routinely collaborate with global brands; Louis Vuitton with Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama, as well as Damien Hirst with Alexander McQueen. Today, the line between art, fashion, and commerce has since become so thin it barely exists. Dal\u00ed, decades earlier, was already operating in that space, treating film, design, and celebrity as extensions of his practice rather than distractions from it.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf that breadth now feels contemporary, it also complicates the artist\u2019s place in the market. In recent years, Surrealism has surged, with artists like\u00a0Ren\u00e9 Magritte\u00a0and\u00a0Leonora Carrington\u00a0achieving record prices\u00a0at auction. Yet Dal\u00ed\u2019s market has remained comparatively uneven, in part because the most significant works from this formative decade rarely come to market at all.<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to data from ARTDAI, the broader Surrealism category has seen substantial long-term growth, with an index increase of more than 2,400 percent since 1980, even as individual markets fluctuate with the availability of top-tier works.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Di Donna, exhibitions unlock that attention. Without them, he has argued, even strong markets can stall; not for lack of interest, but for lack of context. Major shows, he said, create the conditions for collectors to understand what they\u2019re seeing and why it matters, setting off a chain reaction that moves from scholarship to visibility to price.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>
Salvador Dal\u00ed, V\u00e9nus de Milo aux Tiroirs (Venus de Milo with Drawers)<\/em>, 1936\/64
\u00a9 Salvador Dal\u00ed, Gala-Salvador Dal\u00ed Foundation \/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThat logic has guided his program since opening the gallery in 2010. In the intervening years, Di Donna has focused on tightly researched exhibitions that reposition artists within a broader narrative. Past projects have explored underrecognized Surrealists and unexpected dialogues, including a\u00a0recent pairing\u00a0of Magritte and Les Lalanne built around shared sensibilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Dal\u00ed exhibition, however, represents a different kind of ambition. It is not an attempt to rediscover a neglected figure, but to deepen the understanding of one who has never disappeared from view.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor visitors, Di Donna hopes the show will shift attention away from the caricature of Dal\u00ed toward the complexity of his work. \u201cPeople know Dal\u00ed,\u201d he said. \u201cBut they\u2019re not seeing enough.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAs a final statement in this space, the exhibition lands between culmination and pivot: a return to one of Surrealism\u2019s central figures at a moment when the movement itself is being reexamined and, increasingly, revalued.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/dali-exhibition-new-york-di-donna-galleries-2026-1234778024\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/02-Dali-El-desnonament-del-moble-aliment-The-Eviction-of-Furniture-Nutrition-1.jpg?w=1024″] As Emmanuel Di Donna\u00a0prepares to leave his Madison Avenue gallery,\u00a0the veteran dealer\u00a0is returning to the artist most people think they already understand. This spring, Di Donna Galleries will mount one of the most significant exhibitions of\u00a0Salvador Dal\u00ed\u00a0seen in New York in decades. \u201cDal\u00ed: The Great Years, 1929\u20131939,\u201d on view from April 16 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1835480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1835480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1835480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1835480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1835480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1835480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1835480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}