Portrait of Gala 1935

Salvador Dalí painted this ‘Portrait of Gala’ sometime during his surrealist period. Look how he's used thin, almost transparent layers of oil paint, carefully glazed to create a hallucinatory realism. The material quality here is key; it’s not about bravura brushwork. The painting is smooth, almost dreamlike, with a meticulous attention to detail that flirts with hyperrealism. Take a look at the jacket. The pattern is painstakingly rendered with fine lines and subtle color variations, yet it’s also strangely flat, like a tapestry hanging in a dream. This attention to detail, the way the patterns play with the eye, somehow makes it more unreal, more surreal. I think of Magritte when I look at this piece, another artist interested in unsettling the familiar. Dali is really playing with reality in this piece, blurring the lines between what is seen and what is imagined. And that tension, that ambiguity, is what makes it so darn interesting.