Anthological exhibition.

Dalí would have been delighted to see his work exhibited in a classic Venetian palazzo, looking onto the Grand Canal, a place he so much admired and which had so many memories for him. For this reason the staging respects the building’s architecture as far as possible. Hardly any windows are blocked—windows from which the Campo and the Canal can be seen.

Dalí would have been hugely satisfied by the attention that the curator, Dawn Ades, paid to his period least highly rated by progressive critics: the post-Surrealist period (although he would have contended that he never abandoned Surrealism: “Le surrealisme c’est moi”). Consequently, we created a route round the exhibition that was roughly chronological, but which worked backwards, starting with his last canvas and ending with childhood. Furthermore, with this resource, we managed to display the large works (The Madonna of Port Lligat, Perpignan Station, etc.) in the spacious rooms of the piano nobile, while the small paintings from the beginning of Surrealism were displayed in the rooms on the upper floor. Dalí would have been interested in this unusual inverse interpretation, this psychoanalytic analysis of his complex personality.

Dalí, no doubt, would have encouraged me to make a 3-D interpretation of one of the paintings on show in the cortile, the core of the exhibition. We had already done that with the face of Mae West, and that was a thrilling experience, we enjoyed ourselves enormously and we created one of the most popular rooms in the Figueres museum.

For several reasons we were not able to support anything on the paving of the cortile, so our sculpture had to be suspended above it; what could be more Dalinian than to launch an enormous pomegranate, a gaping fish and two fearsome tigers into the air above the defenceless visitors’ heads?"