Salvador Dalí Exhibition - Timeslot Tickets
Salvador Dalí Exhibition - until October 12, 2025, at the Wiener Stadthalle (Studio F)
This comprehensive exhibition will be on display in Vienna from May 2025 to October 2025 and is dedicated to the century artist who is hardly comparable to any other artistic personality of the 20th century. Over 150 works from the renowned Dalí Universe Collection will be showcased, including bronze sculptures, glass paste objects, gilded trinkets, surrealist furniture, and artist-signed graphics. Works from this collection have already been exhibited in over one hundred significant museums and exhibition houses around the world and have been seen by more than twelve million people. The presentation opens new perspectives on a Dalí who, beyond his famous paintings, also acted as a multidisciplinary sculptor, illustrator, and thinker.
“Painting is an infinitely small part of my personality.”
– Salvador Dalí
Dalí was not only a painter – he was a multifaceted artist in the truest sense of the word: an icon of surrealism, alchemist of form, and virtuoso of design. His forms of expression ranged from painting, sculpture, and literature to furniture art, jewelry design, and even advertising – always with his own signature oscillating between excess, irony, and deep symbolism.
The works, most of which will be shown in Vienna for the first time, come from the private collection of Beniamino Levi, one of the most significant collectors of Dalí and founder of the "Dalí Universe". Over five decades, this has grown into one of the world's most comprehensive collections of three-dimensional Dalí works.
In Focus: Dalí in the Third Dimension
The exhibition allows an insight into the side of Dalí that often stands in the shadow of his paintings – his sculptural imagination. Sculptures and objects where the surreal play with transformation unfolds its full magic. Works made of gold, radiant glass paste, and iconic furniture design reflect the essence of that spirit known from his paintings – yet cast into new materials.
Dalí was influenced by the masters of the Renaissance, passionately interested in science, mythology, and religion. His paranoid-critical approach led to works full of double meanings, hidden messages, and intentional distortions. Dalí explored the unconscious, negotiated his fears, his obsessions, his sexuality – and transformed them into lasting imagery. Particularly exciting are the illustrations for the series “Moses and Monotheism” – with texts by Sigmund Freud, who significantly influenced Dalí. The application of psychoanalytic theories creates a fascinating interplay of psychology, religion, and surrealist art – for example, in the sculpture “St. George and the Dragon”, a central Christian narrative that Dalí presents as a surreal interpretation of the eternal struggle between good and evil.
The sculpture Hommage à Terpsichore occupies a prominent place in the exhibition. Terpsichore, one of the nine muses of Greek mythology, was regarded as the goddess of dance and choirs. Her appearance in the Wiener Stadthalle is more than just symbolic: she embodies movement and rhythm – central elements in Dalí's work that run like a red thread through his creations.
Some of Dalí's most iconic paintings were transformed by him into sculptural forms – including "Atavistic Ruins After the Rain" and "Mannequin Javanais" (1969). The sculpture "Toreador Halluciné," on the other hand, consists of seemingly unrelated objects that acquire new, surreal meaning in interaction.
A lesser-known but central aspect of Dalí's work is his collection of etchings and lithographs, which reflect his engagement with literature. His surreal interpretation ranges from classics like Much Ado About Shakespeare (1968) to the provocative and scandal-ridden texts of the Marquis de Sade (1969) – sometimes playful, sometimes disturbing, always profound.
The theme of time, which occupied and fascinated him throughout his life, finds expression in sculptures like Profile of Time and Woman of Time. The famous "melting clocks," for which Dalí is world-renowned, first appeared in his painting The Persistence of Memory (1931). Dalí's attitude towards time, the "guardian of lifespan," is evident in these works: His clocks are often melting, a type of symbolism he used for objects he despised. The omnipresence of time and the transience of youth are emblematically stripped bare by these liquefied clocks. Dalí's understanding of time is no longer rigid and mechanical – but fluid, stretchy, and open to individual meanings.
The exhibition provides insight into Dalí's creative diversity and the range of materials he used – including collaboration with the renowned French glass manufacturer Daum Cristallerie. Dalí regarded glass paste as the ideal medium for depicting "metamorphoses." The gilded objects are extravagant creations made from coins shaped into fantastic ornaments – adorned with the visage of the artist himself and his muse and wife Gala. All these works address the transition from liquid to solid, from the soft to the enduring – a transformation that always fascinated Dalí.
Dalí's interest in furniture design left an icon in the design world: the unmistakable Mae West Lip Sofa.
Virtual Reality – Experience Art with All Senses
As a special highlight, visitors on-site have the opportunity to dive even deeper into Dalí's world in an immersive VR experience. A 360-degree journey into the mind of a spirit whose imagination knew no bounds.
A Universe of Fantasy in Vienna
This exhibition is an artistic maze – a sensory journey through a work that does not separate dream from reality but lets them flow into each other. Each room is an invitation into a world full of possibilities: fascinating, enigmatic, sometimes humorous, often deeply moving.
This exhibition does not display original paintings by Salvador Dalí – but rather rarely shown sculptures, objects, and graphics from the internationally renowned Dalí Universe Collection.
What you see here is not the "Dalí of museums," but that Dalí who is experienced as a designer, thinker, and friend of collectors. Or as Dalí himself would have said: “The original is just the beginning – I am the end.”
Hallo, ich bin Maya.
(c) Mellow
