Salvador Domenec Felip Jacint Dalí Domenech, born in Figueras, Spain, May 11, 1904, is one of the masters of 20th century art. His art displays a meticulous academic technique, contradicted by depictions of hallucinatory characters in an unreal “dream space.” Recurring motifs include the human figure with half-open drawers protruding from it, burning giraffes, and watches bent and flowing as if made from melting wax.

As the viewer studies Salvador Dalí’s art, we glimpse his seemingly boundless, creative mind. We begin to understand the world in ways that may be skewed but arguably more real, and with more truth than through other viewpoints. We see through the eyes of a man who was unapologetically himself, and through that same childlike wonder in which he freed himself from his inhibitions, we also free ourselves.

Salvador Dalí and his sister enjoyed a comfortable upbringing with a sympathetic mother and a successful father. Dalí’s father, a prominent notary, encouraged Salvador Dalí’s artistic inclinations and set him up with drawing lessons at age ten from Ramon Pichot, a well-known Spanish Impressionist painter. In 1923, his father bought him his first printing press.

In 1922, Salvador Dalí moved to Madrid to study painting at the Academy of Arts, where he developed a reputation as an eccentric due to his manner of dress, hairstyles, and provocative comments on art. He experimented with Cubism and Dadaism at school and was expelled before final exams after asserting that those judging his work were not competent enough to grade him.

Salvador Dalí then went on to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro. He established himself as the principal figure of a group of surrealist artists grouped around French poet Andre Breton. He was later expelled from the group in 1934 due to his controversial political views and was henceforth spoken about by the surrealists in past tense, as if he were dead.

Freud’s the Interpretation of Dreams was a key influence for Dalí, leading him to juxtapose incongruous, unrelated, and often bizarre objects against desolate landscape. This disturbing blend of precise realism and dreamlike fantasy became his hallmark.